Affimed AG complements management team by appointing Gavin Clark as VP Business Development and Florian Fischer as Chief Financial Officer
Affimed AG, Heidelberg based recombinant antibody discovery and development company, announced today the appointment of Gavin D. Clark as Executive Vice President Business Development and Florian Fischer as Chief Financial Officer. Gavin Clark is co-founder and principal of Procela Consultants Limited - a Dublin based Biotech Consultancy. Gavin is a chemist who has worked in various senior commercial roles at J&J, Bayer, CIBA-GEIGY, GlaxoWellcome, Phares Drug Delivery and Tibotec-Virco. Since the acquisition of the latter to J&J in 2002 he established Procela. His licensing experience encompasses Global, Regional, Drug Delivery, and Generics deals from both the big and the small side of the table. Florian Fischer is founder and CEO of MedVenture Partners - a Munich based corporate finance and strategy advisory company focusing on the life sciences and health care. He has acted as lead advisor in a variety of transactions and financings the life sciences and health care. Prior to founding MedVenture Partners Florian worked with KPMG for more than 6 years, responsible for biotech and healthcare assignments. Before joining KPMG, he worked for Deutsche Bank AG. Florian holds a graduate degree in business administration and a PhD in public health and is an active lecturer at the Odeon Center for Entrepreneurship of the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität Munich.
»I am very pleased to welcome Gavin and Florian to the Management Board of Affimed AG«, said Dr. Günther CEO of Affimed. »Both bring top calibre industry skills and experience to Affimed. I am confident that their contributions will prove to be invaluable for implementing Affimed's new strategic direction towards our product development focus on Oncology, accelerating our progress in the clinic and capitalising on our leading position in the area of recombinant antibodies. Our goal is further to expand Affimed's financial foundation over time to support our discovery and development projects.«
Affimed is a product-oriented biotech company very strongly positioned in monoclonal antibodies - the fastest growing segment of the pharmaceutical industry. From its inception, Affimed has pursued a focused strategy of developing human antibody therapeutics. By utilizing its broad portfolio of proprietary, in-house technology platforms together with crucial enabling freedom-tooperate licenses the company has been able to establish an early stage and pre-clinical product pipeline of promising novel product candidates in Oncology, Thrombosis and Immune Suppression.
Affimed was founded in May 2000 by Professor Melvyn Little, as a spin-off of his group »Recombinant Antibodies« at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg. Additionally, the company was able to acquire project-related grants amounting to €1.1mio. The company has acquired financial support from both VC and government grants. A further €1mio award has been granted the company under the German federal government program BiochancePLUS to develop highly innovative human recombinant antibodies for cancer treatment. Under a recently concluded project-specific licensing partnership with Syngenta Biopharma funds have been allocated over the next few years for the development of one or more of Affimed's products.