Heptares Adds Experts in Drug Discovery and Development to its Board of Directors

LONDON and BOSTON, January 8, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --

Heptares Therapeutics, the clinical-stage GPCR structure-guided drug discovery and development company, is pleased to announce the appointments of Atul Pande and Roberto Solari to its Board of Directors. Dr Pande and Professor Solari bring significant industry experience in the discovery and validation of drug targets and the subsequent development of novel medicines.

Atul Pande MD is President of Verity BioConsulting, a drug development consulting firm and Chief Medical Officer of Tal Medical, a clinical stage medical device company. Previously he was Senior Vice President and Senior Advisor, Pharmaceutical R&D at GlaxoSmithKline. For more than two decades he has been active in the development of many important CNS drugs while holding various senior roles in Pfizer R&D, Parke-Davis/Warner-Lambert, and Lilly Research Laboratories. Dr Pande is a non-executive board member of Autifony Therapeutics and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of Cennerv Pharma, both UK-based companies.

Roberto Solari is a Visiting Professor within the Infection in Airway Disease research group, Respiratory Infections section within the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, where he is focused on the discovery of novel targets to allow the development of anti-viral drugs against human Rhinovirus. Previously, he worked at Glaxo (now GlaxoSmithKline), which he joined in 1986, and worked on inflammation and allergy drug discovery. He has since held a number of research posts in industry working from target discovery through to human clinical trials.

John Berriman, Chairman of Heptares, said: "Heptares has been prolific in designing promising new drug compounds targeting well validated but previously challenging or intractable GPCRs. We are delighted to welcome Atul and Roberto to the Board and will certainly benefit from their expertise in discovery and development as the Company expands its drug pipeline and clinical trial activities."

About Heptares Therapeutics 

Heptares is a clinical-stage company creating transformative medicines targeting G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), a superfamily of receptors linked to a wide range of human diseases. Our proprietary structure-based drug design technology enables us to engineer drugs for highly validated, yet historically undruggable or challenging, GPCRs. Using this approach, we have built an exciting pipeline of new medicines with the potential to transform the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, ADHD, diabetes, schizophrenia, migraine, and other diseases. Our pharmaceutical partners include Cubist, MorphoSys, Takeda, AstraZeneca and MedImmune, and we are backed by Clarus Ventures, MVM Life Science Partners, Novartis Venture Fund, the Stanley Family Foundation and Takeda Ventures. To learn more about Heptares, please visit http://www.heptares.com 

HEPTARES is a registered trademark in the EU, Switzerland, US and Japan; StaR is a registered trademark in the EU and Japan.