Kymab, a Cambridge, UK-based antibodies-to-medicines company, has strengthened its management team with three appointments to head up its key therapeutic areas.
Professor Paul Kellam will lead the firm’s initiatives in vaccines and infectious disease, Professor Igor Theurl will lead the discovery of medicines for blood diseases, while Matthew McCourt will head immuno-oncology.
Kymab has defined these three areas as a key focus for its strategy to develop new medicines and vaccines in areas of unmet clinical need.
Prof. Kellam, Vice-President of Vaccines & Infectious Disease, has a distinguished career in virology, having worked at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where his team uncovered a crucial human genetic variant that affects the outcome of influenza infection. He is an internationally recognised expert in examining the genomes of emerging infectious disease, such as Ebola and the MERS coronavirus as well as HIV and other virus infections.
In addition to his role at Kymab, Prof. Kellam serves as part-time Professor of Virus Genomics at Imperial College London.
Prof. Theurl, Head of Haematology, is a board-certified practicing physician and experimental scientist whose work includes the area of anaemia of chronic disease. Alongside his leadership role with Kymab, Prof. Theurl will be a part-time Professor of Medicine at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.
McCourt, Vice-President of Immuno-oncology, has been promoted internally having joined Kymab in 2015. He brings 25 years of experience in biopharmaceutical research and development to the firm. Previous experience includes roles as Director of Oncology Biology at MedImmune and Head of Pharmacology at Cambridge Antibody Technology.
