Galapagos Genomics said this week that it has appointed Philip Huxley as senior director of drug discovery.
Huxley was previously head of drug discovery at Avidex, according to Galapagos. Prior to this, he was head of molecular design at British Biotech. He holds a PhD in theoretical chemistry from the University of Sussex in Brighton.
"With the addition of Phil Huxley to the team, we can enter the targets into drug discovery and rapidly move compounds towards the clinic," Galapagos CEO Onno van de Stolpe said in a statement.
Atugen publicly announced the appointment of Peter Buckel as the company's CEO last week.
RNAi News reported Buckel's role at Atugen in late April (see RNAi News, 4/23/2004).
Buckel previously served as CEO of Xantos Biomedicine, a company he co-founded. Prior to this, he was senior vice president of molecular medicine for Roche Diagnostics. Buckel also currently serves as a professor at Ludwig-Maximillians-University, Institute of Microbiology and Genetics in Munich, and is on the advisory board of the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry and Neurobiology.
"We are delighted to welcome Prof Buckel," Jeremy Curnock Cook, chairman of Atugen's supervisory board, said in a statement. "His management experience in R&D will prove invaluable as Atugen moves to the next stage of its siRNA therapeutics development program whilst still managing its contract research business in target validation as a valuable source of revenue."
Atugen also said that Bernd Wetzel has been appointed non-executive director of the company.
Wetzel was formerly head of research and development at, and is a current member of the management board of, Boehringer Ingelheim.
Matthias Mann is to become a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry, effective May 1, 2005. He is currently the director of the Center for Experimental Bioinformatics at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.
Bruce Stillman and Thomas Kelly have jointly received the annual Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Prize, General Motors said this week. They share the $250,000 award, one of three prizes given annually by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation, for their contributions to the understanding of DNA replications in eukaryotes. Stillman is the president and CEO of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Kelly is the director of the Sloan-Kettering Institute.