Dewpoint Therapeutics Appoints Olivier Brandicourt, Jürgen Eckhardt to Board of Directors

With novel drug development platform in place, the company deepens pharmaceutical industry expertise and connections

BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Dewpoint Therapeutics, the biomolecular condensates company, has announced the appointments of Olivier Brandicourt and Jürgen Eckhardt to its board of directors.

An accomplished pharmaceutical industry leader, Dr. Brandicourt has served as CEO of both Sanofi S.A. and Bayer HealthCare AG. Prior to that, he held a series of leadership roles at Pfizer Inc., including a stint as President and General Manager of the Emerging Markets and Established Products units.

“It’s exciting to work with a company that is building on recent scientific insights to discover potential new therapies for diseases with large unmet medical needs,” Dr. Brandicourt said. “Scientists have long known about the existence of biomolecular condensates, but have only recently begun to understand how they play a role in the mechanism of disease. Dewpoint is the first to pioneer a new approach to drug development informed by this understanding.”

A veteran biopharmaceutical investor, Dr. Eckhardt is SVP and Head of Leaps by Bayer, the impact investment unit of Bayer AG that utilizes venture capital in order to advance breakthrough technologies and disruptive business models in healthcare and agriculture. He serves on the boards of several innovative biotechnology companies.

“I have been impressed with Dewpoint since Leaps by Bayer participated, along with other top investors, in its Series A financing round,” Dr. Eckhardt said. “It has been exciting to see the company build its platform, launch its programs, and forge a collaboration with Bayer to bring potentially game-changing condensate technology to life.”

Bayer and Dewpoint announced in November an option, research, and license agreement leveraging Dewpoint’s proprietary platform for condensate-based drug discovery and Bayer’s small molecule compound library to develop new treatments for cardiovascular and gynecological diseases. Bayer has committed as much as $100 million to the partnership and will gain the option to exclusively license a specified number of novel therapeutics derived from the research activities.

“We are thrilled to welcome Olivier and Jürgen to the board and feel lucky for the chance to tap their vast industry experience,” said Dewpoint CEO Amir Nashat. “We founded Dewpoint with the conviction that the company’s breakthrough insights into cell biology will impact all of drug discovery, and these new board additions validate that promise and the progress the platform has shown.”

Dewpoint was launched in January 2019 to develop new medicines for once-intractable diseases by harnessing recent insights into biomolecular condensates from founders Anthony Hyman of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden and Richard Young of the Whitehead Institute. Condensates are droplet-like cellular compartments that form dynamically through a process called liquid-liquid phase separation, allowing cells to respond quickly to changing conditions and control when and where certain biological reactions occur. Though researchers first saw condensates under their microscopes more than a hundred years ago, it’s only in the last decade that they’ve begun to understand the central role that these mysterious structures play in the normal functioning of cells and in a host of ailments, including cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and metabolic disease.

In recognition of his work on condensates, Dr. Hyman was recently awarded the 2020 NOMIS Distinguished Scientist and Scholar Award and the 2020 Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences for his work with condensates. In April, he was elected to the National Academy of Science. Dr. Young was elected in October to the National Academy of Medicine.

About Dewpoint Therapeutics

Dewpoint Therapeutics is the first company founded to apply the emerging discipline of biomolecular condensates to drug discovery. Dewpoint believes that a vast range of conditions have pathways that are regulated by condensates or arise from the dysfunction of condensates — including cancer, neurodegeneration, and metabolic disease. Dewpoint scientists are working in Boston, MA, and Dresden and Berlin, Germany, to translate condensate biology into treatments for the toughest diseases. Learn more at dewpointx.com or engage with us on Twitter at @dewpoint_tx or on LinkedIn.

Contacts

Laura Cruz, TenorPR for Dewpoint Therapeutics

(917) 406-7517

[email protected]