The privately-owned drug discovery company, Cellzome Inc, has appointed Oliver Rausch as senior director of biology and Andrew Ratcliffe as director of chemistry. The appointments follow the company’s agreement on 10 September 2008 to enter into a strategic alliance with GlaxoSmithKline to develop therapies for inflammatory diseases using Cellzome’s expertise with kinase inhibitors.
Both Dr Rausch and Dr Ratcliffe come from UCB Celltech where they were respectively directors of biology and associate director for medicinal chemistry. Dr Rausch has worked primarily in the area of inflammation, researching cell signaling targets such as receptors and kinases. Dr Ratcliffe has experience taking candidate drugs from research into development. He was responsible for taking an important Celltech product for multiple sclerosis into the clinic where it is currently in Phase 2 trials and being developed in collaboration with Biogen.
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