Roivant Appoints Chief Development Officer and Announces Multiple Collaborations in Targeted Protein Degradation
- Dr. Srini Ramanathan has over 20 years of experience in drug development and joins Roivant from Horizon Therapeutics where he built scientific R&D capabilities and teams to advance the company's preclinical and clinical portfolio
- In addition to internal pipeline programs, Roivant companies Proteovant Therapeutics and VantAI have formed external drug development partnerships with leading companies to further innovate in protein degradation
- Collaborations with Blueprint Medicines, Janssen, and Boehringer Ingelheim include aggregate contingent milestone payments of over $1 billion as well as product royalties
BASEL, Switzerland and LONDON and NEW YORK and BOSTON, May 02, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Roivant Sciences (NASDAQ:ROIV) today announced that Srini Ramanathan, Ph.D. will be joining the company as Chief Development Officer. Dr. Ramanathan has over 20 years of drug development expertise across a wide range of diseases. He joins Roivant from Horizon Therapeutics where he served as Senior Vice President of Research and Development Sciences and Site Head of the South San Francisco office. At Horizon, Dr. Ramanathan was responsible for building various scientific functions in discovery and development supporting pipeline expansion, regulatory submissions, and business development activities. Earlier in his career, he served in leadership roles at AbbVie and Gilead Sciences. He has contributed to the global approval of several medicines in virology, oncology, and autoimmune disease, and has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals.
"I am excited to join Roivant, one of the most innovative companies in the industry, and I look forward to supporting the advancement of novel medicines across multiple modalities and therapeutic areas," said Dr. Ramanathan.
Roivant also announced that two of its subsidiary companies, Proteovant Therapeutics and VantAI, have entered into several recently announced research collaboration agreements focused on the discovery and development of novel protein degraders and next-generation E3 ligase platforms:
- Proteovant and Blueprint Medicines have formed a strategic collaboration that brings together Proteovant's targeted protein degrader discovery and development platform, inclusive of biology, chemistry and proteomics capabilities, and VantAI's leading artificial intelligence technologies for degrader generation and optimization with Blueprint Medicine's precision medicine expertise to discover novel targeted protein degraders. The companies will jointly research important targets and advance up to two novel protein degrader therapies into development.
- VantAI and Janssen Pharmaceutica recently announced a multi-year collaboration in which the two firms will leverage VantAI's geometric deep learning platform to generate protein degrader drug candidates for two significant disease targets and collaborate on the discovery and implementation E3 ligase platforms relating to those targets.
- VantAI and Boehringer Ingelheim recently announced a research collaboration focused on degrading traditionally "undruggable" targets. The collaboration is initially focused on one degrader program combined with proprietary E3 ligase platforms for those specific targets. The two organizations and their scientists will leverage VantAI's geometric deep learning platform to computationally streamline the design of these new molecules optimized for E3 ligase platforms.
"I am delighted by the progress of our collaborations in targeted protein degradation and the work our teams are doing with these innovative partners," said Matt Gline, CEO of Roivant. "In addition, I am excited to welcome Dr. Ramanathan to our leadership team and look forward to his contributions to our development organization."
About Roivant
Roivant's mission is to improve the delivery of healthcare to patients by treating every inefficiency as an opportunity. Roivant develops transformative medicines faster by building technologies and developing talent in creative ways, leveraging the Roivant platform to launch 'Vants' – nimble and focused biopharmaceutical and health technology companies. For more information, please visit www.roivant.com.
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