Co-Founder Gavin MacBeath, Ph. D. Joins Merrimack Pharmaceuticals as a Senior Director and the Head of Translational Research
Gavin MacBeath, Ph. D., will be responsible for leading the MM-121 research team through Development and creating the Company’s general strategy for predictive medicine.
Cambridge, MA (PRWEB) May 26, 2010
Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a privately held biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of novel treatments for cancer and inflammation, today announced that Gavin MacBeath, Ph. D., one of the Company’s six founders, has been hired as a Senior Director and the Head of Translational Research.
“Gavin joining Merrimack underscores the pivotal next step of our vision to extend Network Biology beyond discovery research and apply it to clinical development of drugs. We believe translational science anchored in Network Biology is a key recipe for developing next generation drugs as we better characterize the underlying tumor biology for the patients we are treating,” says Clet Niyikiza, Ph. D., Merrimack’s Senior Vice President of Development.
Since Merrimack was founded in 2000, Dr. MacBeath has served on the faculty in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, where he has focused on developing technology that facilitates basic research in the area of systems biology. In this new position, Dr. MacBeath will be responsible for leading the MM-121 research team through Development and creating the Company’s general strategy for predictive medicine.
“Merrimack provides the resources and environment needed to address what I believe is the biggest challenge in biomedical research for the twenty-first century - the problem of matching patients to therapies” said Dr. MacBeath. “Research and development at Merrimack over the coming years will determine how important Network Biology is in the context of co-developing drugs and companion diagnostics that identify which patients will respond most effectively.”
Dr. MacBeath will continue to direct a research lab at Harvard Medical School and will serve as a bridge between Merrimack and Harvard’s academic community. Dr. MacBeath received his Bachelors of Science at the University of Manitoba and his doctorate in Macromolecular and Cellular Structure and Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute.
About Merrimack
Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery and development of novel medicines for the treatment of cancer and inflammation. The Company is advancing a robust pipeline of engineered therapeutics paired with molecular diagnostics. Merrimack’s first two oncology candidates, MM-121, partnered with sanofi-aventis, and MM-111, are in Phase 1 clinical testing with multiple pre-clinical development and research stage programs in the pipeline. MM-121 and MM-111 are investigational drugs and have not been approved by the U. S. Food and Drug Administration or any international regulatory agency. The Company’s proprietary Network Biology discovery platform, developed with the help of leading scientists from MIT and Harvard, integrates the fields of engineering, biology and computing to enable mechanism-based model driven discovery and development of both therapeutics and diagnostics. Merrimack is a privately-held company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For additional information, please visit http://www. merrimackpharma. com.
Contact: Kathleen Petrozzelli, Corporate Communications, 617-441-1043, kpetrozzelli(at)merrimackpharma(dot)com; Betsy Raymond Stevenson, 860-984-1424, RaymondStevenson Healthcare Comms betsy(at)raymondstevenson(dot)com
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