Vincerx Pharma Strengthens Management Team With Three New Appointments
Vincerx Pharma, Inc. (Nasdaq: VINC), a biopharmaceutical company aspiring to address the unmet medical needs of patients with cancer through paradigm-shifting therapeutics, today announced the addition of three new executives to the company’s management team. Hermes Garbán, M.D., Ph.D. has been appointed as Chief Medical Officer, Hans-Georg Lerchen, Ph.D. has been appointed as Chief Scientific Officer, and Tom Thomas, has been appointed as General Counsel and Chief Legal Officer of Vincerx.
“The addition of Hermes, Hans-Georg, and Tom to the Vincerx team provides important expertise and experience to our accomplished management team as we enter the next stage of our development,” said Ahmed Hamdy M.D., Chief Executive Officer of Vincerx. “The past months have been transformative at Vincerx, marked by our launch as a public company, and this groups’ combined decades of medical, scientific and legal acumen across biotech will be key as we work towards advancing our pipeline of targeted oncology therapeutics. We look forward to leveraging this strengthened team as we work towards important milestones through 2021 including the initiation of our Phase 1b studies evaluating VIP52, our highly selective and potent CDK9 inihitor, in Myc-driven hematologic malignancies and solid tumors, as well as relapsed/refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia.”
Hermes Garbán, M.D., Ph.D.
Hermes Garbán, M.D., Ph.D. is the Chief Medical Officer of Vincerx Pharma, Inc. Before joining Vincerx, Dr. Garbán served as Head, Therapeutics Discovery and Development at ImmunityBio, Inc., a registration stage immuno-oncology and infectious disease company responsible for conducting Phase 1 through Phase 3 clinical trials focusing on solid tumors and immunotherapies development, from March 2019 to February 2021. Before that, Dr. Garbán served as Head, Therapeutics Discovery and Development at NantBioscience, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery of innovative cancer and infectious diseases, therapeutics and their clinical applications, from June 2017 to March 2019, and as Head, Therapeutic Antibody Discovery from September 2014 to June 2017. During his tenure at NantBioscience, Dr. Garbán also served as Deputy Vice President, Global Cell Manufacturing supporting operations at Nantkwest, Inc, an innovative clinical-stage immunotherapy company, from June 2017 to October 2018. Dr. Garbán served as Principal Investigator at the California NanoSystems Institute (CnSI) and Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 2009 to 2014. Prior to that, Dr. Garbán served as Assistant Professor of Surgery in the Division of Surgical Oncology at UCLA from 2005 to 2009. Dr. Garbán is a physician-scientist who earned his M.D. from the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), where his medical practice focused on underserved and indigenous communities. He earned his Ph.D. in Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr. Garbán trained as postdoctoral fellow in Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA under the mentorship of Dr. Louis Ignarro (1998 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine).
Hans-Georg Lerchen, Ph.D.
Hans-Georg Lerchen, Ph.D. is the Chief Scientific Officer of Vincerx. Before joining Vincerx, Dr. Lerchen was a Distinguished Fellow in the Bayer Science Fellow Network of the Pharmaceuticals R&D organization of Bayer AG. With 33 years background in medicinal chemistry, he is author or coauthor of 81 patents/patent applications and 27 peer reviewed publications. Dr. Lerchen contributed to 5 INDs and to the identification of numerous preclinical candidates and lead structures. With his research focus on prodrugs and drug delivery modalities, he was the medicinal chemistry lead and key driver of diverse bioconjugate programs, including the development of ADCs with the novel KSPi toxophore and legumain linker platform, which Vincerx acquired from Bayer. Dr. Lerchen received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Mainz with Professor Horst Kunz. After a year of research as a Max Planck postdoctoral scholarship holder at the MPI for Biochemistry in Munich, he started his industrial career at Bayer AG Leverkusen in the Central Research Department. After 14 years with responsibilities for different basic research programs he moved to the Medicinal Chemistry unit of the Pharmaceuticals Division of Bayer in Wuppertal. As a renowned scientist in the ADC field, Dr. Lerchen is an invited speaker on various international conferences. He serves as a board member of the biochemistry subgroup of the German Chemical Society (GDCh).
Tom Thomas, J.D.
Tom Thomas will be joining as General Counsel and Chief Legal Officer of Vincerx on March 15. Mr. Thomas is a partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, a leading international law firm with offices in major metropolitan centers around the world. He has over 30 years of experience representing life science and technology companies at all stages of development, from start-up and emerging companies, to pre-IPO companies, to large public and private companies. His practice has focused on corporate and securities matters, including corporate governance, debt and equity financings, public and private acquisitions and dispositions, venture capital financings and investments, SPAC transactions, PIPE offerings, joint ventures and strategic alliances, SEC compliance and reporting, executive compensation, and technology transactions. Mr. Thomas received his B.B.A. in Accounting from the University of Iowa, where he graduated summa cum laude, and his J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude.
About Vincerx Pharma, Inc.
Vincerx Pharma (Vincerx) is a recently formed clinical-stage life sciences company focused on leveraging its extensive development and oncology expertise to advance new therapies intended to address unmet medical needs for the treatment of cancer. Vincerx’s executive team has assembled a management team of biopharmaceutical experts with extensive experience in building and operating organizations that develop and deliver innovative medicines to patients. Vincerx’s current pipeline is derived from an exclusive license agreement with Bayer and includes a clinical-stage and follow-on small molecule drug program and a preclinical stage bioconjugation/next-generation antibody-drug conjugate platform. For more information, please visit www.vincerx.com.
