UK regenerative medicine biotech appoints veteran 'drug hunter' as CSO

The UK regenerative medicine biotech OxStem has appointed former GSK and AbbVie executive Georg Terstappen as chief scientific officer.

OxStem hopes to develop small molecule drugs that wake up stem cells to repair tissues affected by disease or injury.

Terstappen will help to spearhead these efforts, drawing on 25 years’ experience in R&D in pharma companies including Bayer, GlaxoWellcome, GlaxoSmithKline, and Abbott/Abbvie.

He also co-founded the start-up drug discovery company Siena Biotech, and most recently worked as head of platform technologies and science at GSK’s R&D centre in Shanghai, with responsibility for preclinical drug development.

Georg Terstappen

Terstappen was also head of Discovery Biology at AbbVie in Ludwigshafen (Germany) and was vice chair of the Innovative Medicines Strategy Group, part of the European public-private Innovative Medicines Initiative.

He is also a founding member and co-chair of the Strategic Governing Group for Neurodegeneration.

Reporting to the CEO and working in close collaboration with OxStem's founders and principal investigators at the University of Oxford, the CSO will assume executive responsibility for delivery on the biotech's discovery and development plans across its portfolio of six programmes.

Terstappen has a first-class honours degree in biology and prior to joining the pharmaceutical industry in 1992, conducted research at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne (Germany) and the Federal Research Centre Jülich (Germany) for which he received a PhD in Natural Sciences.

Michael Stein, chairman and CEO at OxStem said: “I warmly welcome Georg to OxStem and we are thrilled to have attracted such an accomplished drug hunter to the OxStem Team. Georg brings extensive R&D management experience to OxStem and his track record of delivery in both pharma and biotech is well-evidenced. He joins OxStem at a time of significant growth and acceleration in our discovery programmes and we look forward to working with him on our important mission to deliver innovative medicines based on the translation of our breakthrough science.”