Affinium Pharmaceuticals of Toronto has appointed new senior directors in chemistry and structural biology, and has promoted three existing senior executives: Klaus Fiebig will be the company’s new senior director of structural biology, leading its efforts in X-ray crystallography and NMR. Fiebig comes to Affinium from MRPharm of Frankfurt, Germany, where he was CEO and a co-founder. He holds a PhD in pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of California, San Francisco. Henry Pauls is the company’s new senior director of medicinal chemistry. He previously worked on asthma and inflammation therapies at Aventis, and held positions at
Rhône-Poulenc Rorer
and Allexis Biopharmaceuticals. Pauls received his PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from Duke University. Additionally, Affinium said Molly Schmid has been promoted to senior vice president of pre-clinical programs, Raymond Hui has been named vice president of engineering and process development, and Joanne Harack has received the title of vice president, human resources and corporate communications.
Ed Hurwitz, the interim CEO of Aclara Biosciences, left the company Feb. 21 to devote his full-time attention to his position at Alta Partners, a San Francisco venture capital firm. Hurwitz came to Aclara from Affymetrix, where he was CFO. The company’s board has brought back Joseph Limber, who stepped down as CEO December 1, to run the company as part of “the office of the president” along with director André Marion. Hurwitz will continue to serve on the board of Aclara, which is focusing on development of its eTag assays for identification of genes or proteins from limited samples.
Amersham PLC, the parent company of Amersham Biosciences, has said it will cut 400 jobs in R&D, which includes its proteomics instrumentation and reagent business. It was not clear as of press time which jobs would be cut.
Reinhard Schneider, chief information officer of Lion Bioscience, has left the Heidelberg, Germany company as part of a planned restructuring. The company, which makes the SRS discovery platform, has hired IBM veteran Reiner Doelle to head up software development.