SGX Appoints Neill Giese, Ph.D. As Senior Vice President of Drug Development
SAN DIEGO, April 22 /PRNewswire/ — SGX (Structural GenomiX, Inc.) announced today the appointment of Neill Giese, Ph.D. as senior vice president of drug development. Dr. Giese will be responsible for all translational biology, and pre-clinical and clinical development at SGX.
“Neill’s wealth of experience with developing small molecule cancer therapies will be instrumental in driving our drug discovery programs into human trials and through the clinic,” said Tim Harris, Ph.D., chief executive officer of SGX. “We are very excited to have Neill join the SGX team.”
Dr. Giese has over 14 years of experience in drug discovery and development ranging from target identification to clinical trials. He joins SGX from Millennium Pharmaceuticals where he played a lead role in the discovery and development of MLN518, an oral small molecule kinase inhibitor currently being studied in Phase II clinical trials for the treatment of acute myelogenous leukemia. He completed his postdoctoral work in molecular oncology under Stuart Aaronson’s direction at the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Giese received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in Pharmacology/Toxicology and his B.S. in Pharmacy from Oregon State University.
“I am thrilled to join SGX and share in SGX’s commitment to developing innovative therapies for the treatment of cancer,” said Giese. “SGX has already made impressive progress in the company’s drug discovery programs by utilizing FAST(TM) lead generation technology. I look forward to continuing SGX’s success with the further development of these programs as we progress towards human trials.”
About SGX
SGX is a structure guided drug discovery company accelerating the discovery of novel therapeutics to treat human diseases. SGX has developed FAST(TM), a proprietary technology for rapid identification of novel, potent and selective small molecule inhibitors of drug targets. FAST(TM) relies on libraries of synthetically enabled fragments developed by SGX, to ensure rapid hit-to-lead optimization and draws on SGX expertise in high-throughput co-crystallography, state of the art computational scoring and automated parallel synthesis. SGX technology drives the lead optimization process through iterative determination of co-crystal structures that reveal, in atomic detail, how small molecules interact with drug targets. The Company has established unparalleled capacity in this area by building SGX-CAT, a world-class facility for the collection of macromolecular X-ray diffraction data at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. SGX utilizes FAST(TM) on programs focused in oncology as well as partnered programs in other disease areas. The Company is based in San Diego, California. For more information, please visit our website at http://www.stromix.com/.
Structural GenomiX, Inc.
CONTACT: Herbert G. Mutter, Vice President, Finance of SGX,+1-858-228-1565, herb_mutter@stromix.com; or Jason Spark of Atkins +Associates, +1-858-527-3491, jspark@irpr.com, for SGX
Web site: http://www.stromix.com/