Toronto, Nov. 28, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Fibrocor Therapeutics (Fibrocor) announced today that Mark Steedman has been appointed as its first president and CEO, and will serve as a member of Fibrocor’s board of directors.
Mr. Steedman is the co-founder of Interface Biologics where he most recently served as VP, Business Development. He was responsible for all start-up operations including financing and business development up to Series A totaling $13M, and was instrumental in early transactions with large multinational corporations, which ultimately led to FDA approval and 1 million patients that have benefitted from an anti-thrombotic technology. Prior to this, Mr. Steedman was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Genesys Capital Partners in Toronto, Canada.
“Fibrocor’s mandate is to develop first-in-class therapeutics to target fibrotic diseases” said Mark Steedman. “I am pleased to join the talented scientific founding team at Fibrocor and, through collaboration with our founding partners MaRS Innovation (MI) and Evotec AG in Germany, lead the company to successfully identify new target pathways to meet a large unmet need in this area.” The company is currently in talks with large pharma partners regarding its lead and pipeline programs.
“We are extremely pleased to be able to recruit an executive with such extensive knowledge and background in life sciences venture-building” said Rafi Hofstein, President and CEO of MI. “Fibrocor is leveraging a clinically relevant platform to build a strong-hold for fibrosis drug discovery in Toronto and recruit international partners such as Evotec to Canada. Mark is coming on board at a very opportune time to help steer this company to a successful fruition. Through this appointment, MI continues to fulfill its mandate of not only developing companies that stay in Canada, but of hiring the best talent – all for the benefit of Canada”.
ABOUT FIBROCOR THERAPEUTICS – Fibrocor Therapeutics is focused on developing disease modifying therapeutics in fibrosis. The company’s platform is based on discovery of novel targets and dissection of molecular pathways from a well annotated tissue bank of diseased and non-diseased patient samples. As one of the first platforms that discover targets directly from human samples, the company was founded based on the transformational work of Drs. Richard Gilbert and Darren Yuen at St. Michael Hospital and Dr Jeff Wrana at Mount Sinai Hospital all of whom are cross appointed to the University of Toronto. Using this first-in class tissue discovery platform, Fibrocor has partnered with Evotec and MI to develop first-in class therapeutics to novel molecular targets and pathways in fibrosis.
Mark Steedman Fibrocor Therapeutics mark@fibrocortherapeutics.com