Monte Rosa Therapeutics Strengthens Leadership with Key Executive and Board Appointments
-- Promotes Sharon Townson, Ph.D., to Chief Technology Officer --
-- Nir London, Ph.D., Appointed to Scientific Advisory Board --
-- Christine Siu Joins Board of Directors --
BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Monte Rosa Therapeutics, a biotechnology company focused on discovering and developing precision medicines that degrade disease-causing proteins, announced today the promotion of Sharon Townson, Ph.D., formerly Vice President, Biomolecular Sciences, to the newly created role of Chief Technology Officer. In addition, Nir London, Ph.D., has been appointed to the company’s Scientific Advisory Board, and Christine Siu has joined Monte Rosa’s Board of Directors.
“As we continue to build out our team, we are excited to have Sharon assume the position of Chief Technology Officer. She will play an important role as we approach key milestones in advancing our platform of molecular glue degraders,” said Monte Rosa CEO Markus Warmuth, M.D. “In addition, we are pleased to welcome Nir and Christine to the Scientific Advisory Board and Board of Directors, where they respectively bring valuable industry insight across drug discovery and cancer biology, as well as corporate growth and operational excellence—factors critical to our success as we build out our pipeline and bring our protein degrader therapies into clinical trials.”
Dr. Townson joined Monte Rosa in July as Vice President, Biomolecular Sciences. Prior to Monte Rosa, she served as Executive Director and Head of Platform Biology at Kymera Therapeutics and was responsible for overseeing their targeted protein degradation platform. She previously served on the senior leadership team at Warp Drive Bio, where she played a pivotal role in establishing the company’s novel molecular glue technology platform before the company was acquired by Revolution Medicines in 2018. Dr. Townson began her career at Pfizer as a Structural Biologist and holds a Ph.D. in structural biology and biochemistry from the University of Manchester Institute of Technology (UMIST) in the U.K.
Dr. London is a Senior Scientist (Assistant Professor) at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, where his research is focused on developing and applying computational and experimental methods to design and discover new compounds for applications in chemical biology and drug discovery and design, with a focus on covalent inhibition and cancer biology. Dr. London was a post-doctoral scholar at the UC San Francisco, Mission Bay, and an EMBO fellow, focused on methods of development for virtual screening. Dr. London received both his Ph.D. in computational structural biology and his B.Sc. in computer science and computational biology from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Christine Siu is the Chief Operating Officer in Residence of BridgeBio. She formerly served as the Chief Financial Officer of Eidos Therapeutics, a BridgeBio company. Prior to that, Ms. Siu served as the Chief Business Officer of the Bluefield Project to Cure Frontotemporal Dementia and was a Venture Principal at Third Rock Ventures, where she helped start Global Blood Therapeutics (GBT) and was the first employee. Previously, she held roles of increasing responsibility at private equity and venture capital firms, Warburg Pincus and Thomas, McNerney & Partners, where she invested in life sciences companies. Ms. Siu holds her MBA from Harvard Business School and her B.S. with distinction in cellular molecular biology and economics from the University of Michigan.
About Monte Rosa
Monte Rosa Therapeutics is a biotechnology company discovering and developing molecular glues to degrade disease-causing proteins. The company has created a platform to rationally design small molecules that reprogram ubiquitin ligases to eliminate disease drivers previously deemed undruggable. The company’s drug discovery platform combines diverse and proprietary chemical libraries of small molecule protein degraders with in-house proteomics, structural biology, machine learning-based target selection and computational chemistry capabilities to predict and obtain protein degradation profiles. Monte Rosa was launched from founding investor Versant Ventures’ Ridgeline Discovery Engine and is headquartered in Boston, Mass., with research operations in both Boston and Basel, Switzerland. For more information, visit www.monterosatx.com.
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