Stephen Hitchcock to Head Drug Discovery at Envoy Therapeutics
JUPITER, Fla., Mar 01, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Envoy Therapeutics, Inc. today announced that Stephen Hitchcock, Ph.D. has joined the company's management team as Senior Vice President, Drug Discovery.
Dr. Hitchcock joins Envoy on the heels of six year tenure at Amgen, where he was Executive Director of Medicinal Chemistry, leading a group of chemists as well as overseeing outsourced chemistry programs. Prior to Amgen, Dr. Hitchcock spent ten years directing a team of chemists at Eli Lilly, advancing programs from lead to clinical candidate selection, guiding optimization strategy, and coordinating medicinal chemistry across multiple therapeutic areas.
Dr. Hitchcock obtained his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Nottingham followed by a NATO post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University. An author and co-inventor on more than fifty patents, patent applications, papers and review articles, Dr. Hitchcock is a recognized expert in the blood-brain-barrier field. His background spans GPCR, transporter, protease, phosphodiesterase kinase and ion channel projects encompassing neuroscience, oncology, inflammation and infectious disease indications. In addition, he has expertise in receptor occupancy and imaging (PET) tracer design and optimization, as well as structure-based, property-based and, fragment-based drug design methodologies. He has also managed chemistry technologies, automated synthesis and parallel purification operations.
"Steve's track record of delivering multiple clinical candidates, including Amgen's first small molecule CNS-targeted clinical compound, make him the ideal complement to our founding team," said Brad Margus, Chief Executive Officer of Envoy. "We look forward to Steve accelerating the pace at which we achieve our corporate goal of quickly building a portfolio of promising new compounds."
"I was attracted by the precision of Envoy's bacTRAP technology and the high-potential therapeutic targets it can discover," said Dr. Hitchcock. "The opportunity to lead the company's efforts to identify and optimize new drugs that modulate these targets is incredibly compelling."
About Envoy Therapeutics
Envoy Therapeutics' mission is to discover new drugs with superior efficacy and fewer side effects than existing treatments. The company's bacTRAP(R) technology enables the identification of proteins in vivo that are produced by specific cell types without requiring the isolation of those cells. The technology is especially powerful in tissues of the brain, where many hundreds of cell types are intermingled. Because therapeutically modulating the activity of a specific cell type has until now been prevented by the inability to determine which proteins are uniquely expressed by that cell type, Envoy brings a new day in drug discovery.
SOURCE: Envoy Therapeutics, Inc.
Envoy Therapeutics, Inc.
Brad Margus, Chief Executive Officer, 561-210-7705