CAMBRIDGE, Mass.– LifeMine Therapeutics Inc., a biopharmaceutical company reinventing drug discovery by mining genetically-encoded small molecules (GEMs) from the biosphere, today announced the appointments of Martin Stahl, Ph.D., as chief scientific officer and Louis Plamondon, Ph.D., as executive vice president and head of CMC. Dr. Stahl, former global head of lead discovery at Roche, will also lead LifeMine’s operations at its European offices in Basel, Switzerland.
“Martin and Louis are stellar additions to the LifeMine executive team and share in our vision to reinvent small molecule drug discovery through genomic search and retrieval from the biosphere,” said Gregory Verdine, Ph.D., co-founder, president and chief executive officer of LifeMine. “We continue to make substantial progress at LifeMine scaling our Avatar-Rx platform and advancing our multiple drug discovery programs towards the clinic with unparalleled speed, predictability, and scalability. Martin and Louis’ experience and expertise will only help further accelerate our efforts.”
Martin Stahl, Ph.D., appointed to chief scientific officer
Dr. Stahl joins LifeMine from Roche, where he held a variety of scientific leadership roles over 25 years, including positions in medicinal chemistry, immunology, portfolio management and research technologies. Most recently, he served as global head of lead discovery, an organization comprising biophysics, biostructure, biochemistry, cell engineering, assay development and screening capabilities. During his tenure at Roche, Dr. Stahl built program management for the company’s small molecule research portfolio, and led a diverse array of global initiatives, shaping culture, infrastructure and data science.
A chemist by training, Dr. Stahl has published widely on molecular design and was the recipient of an ACS National Award for Computers in Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences. He is an advisory board member of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, an editorial advisory board member of ChemMedChem, and he has been a trustee of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre.
Dr. Stahl studied chemistry at The University of Freiburg and at The Julius Maximilians University in Würzburg, Germany, and obtained a Ph.D. in computational chemistry from The Philipp University of Marburg.
Louis Plamondon, Ph.D., appointed to executive vice president and head of CMC
Prior to joining LifeMine, Dr. Plamondon was senior vice president and head of CMC at Constellation Pharmaceuticals (a MorphoSys company), where he led all pre-development/development activities including production of drug substance and drug product for pre-clinical studies, toxicology studies, clinical studies and preparations for commercialization.
Dr. Plamondon’s expertise ranges from enabling Phase 1 studies through global registrational application and commercial manufacturing, including establishing clinical and commercial supply chain strategies, vendor and alliance management, portfolio strategy implementation, developing regulatory strategies, negotiating with global health authorities, developing life-cycle management strategies and generating secondary patents to extend product life cycles.
Dr. Plamondon is a co-inventor and leader for Velcade® (bortezomib), the first proteasome inhibitor approved for the treatment of patients with multiple myeloma, and co-inventor for Xerava® (eravacycline), the first fully synthetic fluorocycline used for the treatment of complicated intra-abdominal infections (cIAI).
Dr. Plamondon holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the Université de Montréal and completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.