Heptares Chief Scientific Officer and Founder Fiona Marshall
Receives Prestigious UK "Women of Outstanding Achievement Award"
WELWYN GARDEN CITY,
England and BOSTON, November 30,
2012 /PRNewswire/ --
Heptares Therapeutics, the leading GPCR drug discovery company,
is delighted to announce that its Chief Scientific Officer and
founder, Fiona Marshall, has
received a 2012 Women of Outstanding Achievement Award from WISE, a
UK national campaign to promote female talent in science,
engineering, technology and the built environment. Dr Marshall
received the award in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship category
in recognition of her academic and industry achievements as well as
her positive contributions in attracting women to the life sciences
area.
Dr Marshall received her award from Her Royal Highness, The
Princess Royal at the prestigious WISE Awards held yesterday at The
Institution of Technology and Engineering in London, UK.
"I'm very grateful to receive this award. I have seen Heptares
grow from just two of us in a portacabin to a world-leading biotech
company with more than 60 scientists, including women from around
the world, working in chemistry, crystallography, biochemistry and
pharmacology. It has been wonderful to work with so many talented
young scientists." commented Dr Marshall. "This team is central to
Heptares' leadership in the GPCR field, solving the structures of
clinically important GPCRs and leveraging this structural insight
to discover and design exciting new drug candidates. Heptares today
has a substantial pipeline of unique agents in development for
treating serious diseases such as Alzheimer's disease,
schizophrenia, chronic insomnia, addiction disorders, migraine and
diabetes, as well as partnerships with multiple leading
pharmaceutical companies."
Malcolm Weir, Heptares' CEO,
added: "Fiona is an exceptional scientist and on behalf of all of
us at Heptares, we congratulate her on receiving this award in
recognition of her work; it is very well deserved."
Biography
Dr Marshall received a BSc in biochemistry from Bath University
and a PhD in neuroscience from Cambridge
University. She has more than 20 years' experience in drug
discovery with particular expertise on GPCRs, is inventor of seven
patents and author of over 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers in
the area of GPCRs. Her work has contributed to the development of
drugs for asthma, schizophrenia, heart disease and Parkinson's
disease.
Dr Marshall set up Heptares Therapeutics, one of the UK's
leading biotechnology companies, with Malcolm Weir in 2006. She now leads a team of 60
scientists at Heptares, which is pioneering a structure-based drug
design approach to GPCRs and building a broad pipeline of novel
medicines to transform the treatment of serious diseases. Heptares
has established drug R&D collaborations with Shire, Takeda,
AstraZeneca and Medimmune.
Before Heptares, Dr Marshall spent 12 years at
GlaxoWellcome/GlaxoSmithKline where she held a number of senior
positions including Head of the Department of Molecular
Pharmacology and Head of GPCR research. She was Director of
Discovery Pharmacology, Europe for
Millennium Pharmaceuticals and then spent several years as an
independent consultant to a variety of venture capital and biotech
companies. She was chair of the BBSRC biochemistry and cell biology
committee for three years and is currently Chair of the CRUK Drug
Discovery Committee and Vice-chair of the Wellcome Trust Seeding
Drug Discovery Committee.
A short video clip can be seen by clicking here.
About the Awards
The Women of Outstanding Achievement Awards celebrate women who
are creating change, making discoveries, innovating processes,
establishing new ventures and helping the UK excel in STEM
(science, technology, engineering and mathematics). They are
presented by WISE, a UK national campaign to promote female talent
in science, engineering, technology and the built environment.
WISE provides training and consultancy to schools, colleges,
business and industry to help them attract, retain and develop the
potential of women studying and working in the fields of science,
engineering, technology and the built environment. Find out more at
http://www.wisecampaign.org.uk or ring
+44-(0)1274-724-009.
About Heptares Therapeutics
Heptares discovers and develops new medicines targeting GPCRs
(Gprotein-coupled receptors), a super-family of drug targets linked
to a wide range of human diseases. Our pharmaceutical
partners include Shire, AstraZeneca, MedImmune and Takeda, and we
are backed by MVM Life Science Partners, Clarus Ventures, Novartis
Venture Fund and Takeda Ventures.
Heptares is pioneering the application of structure-based drug
design to the GPCR superfamily of targets and is focused on
creating molecules that modulate high-value, yet historically
undruggable or challenging, GPCRs. Our platform incorporates
proprietary technologies for engineering stabilised GPCRs in their
natural pharmacological conformations, identifying previously
unknown chemistries for GPCR protein-drug interactions, and
deploying advanced fragment-based approaches to GPCR target space
for the first time.
Using this approach, we have generated a broad pipeline of drug
candidates for the treatment of serious disorders, including
Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia,
depression, chronic insomnia, addiction disorders, migraine and
diabetes. For more information about Heptares, please visit
http://www.heptares.com.