Crown Bioscience President Honored in PharmaVOICE 100

Crown Bioscience, Inc. has announced that its president, Dr. Jean-Pierre Wery, has been selected by PharmaVOICE as one of the top 100 most inspiring people within the life sciences sector.

Dr. Wery was selected from a large cross section of established professionals in the life sciences industry for his continuing contributions to improving the efficiency and reducing the cost of the drug discovery and development process via translational science platforms for oncology and metabolic disease.

Since joining Crown Bioscience in 2008, Dr. Wery has developed solutions to some of the biggest problems facing drug development in oncology and metabolic disease, namely the increasing attrition rates in the clinic. Confronting this issue, Dr. Wery has pioneered an extremely successful translational platform that can be easily accessed by researchers in both the oncology and metabolic disease fields. Access to this platform will have a profound impact on the overall efficiency of the drug discovery and development process, significantly bridging the gap between pre-clinical promise and successful clinical development – it has so far been used by over 300 global drug developers to date.

Dr. Wery has made a unique impact in the application of one of the cornerstones of Crown’s oncology translational platform: novel animal models called Patient Derived Xenograft (PDX), which have been shown to be extremely predictive on how a human tumor will react to a given treatment. Dr Wery has guided Crown Bioscience to build the world’s largest and best characterized collection of such PDX models encompassing many cancer types from both Caucasian and Asian patients – a collection which reached 1,000 models in April 2014. The collection’s size and diversity allows for more informed preclinical decision making on prospective drug candidates, and offers pharmaceutical and biotech partners a unique tool to improve the selection and development path for promising clinical candidates. This can significantly accelerate research programs, reducing costs and failure rates of drug candidate development.

Guo Liang Yu, Executive Chairman of Crown Bioscience, commented: “Jean-Pierre has a unique understanding of the drug development process and the cost of failure in clinical trials. As the biggest issue is the financial backing for candidates through to clinical trials, his solution to radically improve the efficiency of the development process has had a dramatic impact on the pharmaceutical industry. Under Jean-Pierre’s direction, we have been able to lead the way in the development of pre-clinical screening technology, developing the world’s largest resource of clinical models and surrogate trial platforms. The significant reductions in time and cost, coupled with the accuracy of prediction for the performance of a candidate in full clinical trials, have provided invaluable information about the efficacy and suitability of a drug candidate, allowing developers to select only their most promising therapeutics for advancement into the clinic. The HuPrime®, HuKemia®, HuBase™, HuMark™, HuTrial™ and HuSignature™ platforms that Jean-Pierre has helped pioneer, have enabled unique lead optimization and translational treatment strategies for drug discovery companies around the world, to ultimately deliver superior candidates for successful treatment in the clinic.”

Dr Wery commented, “It is a great honor to be nominated by my peers. Considering their own invaluable contributions to advancements in the field of life sciences, I feel we all deserve to share in the rewards due to our combined efforts. The life science industry provides us with difficult challenges, and future collaboration will be key to the discovery and progression of new strategies to overcome the problems we face in the clinic. Access to our translational platforms will continue to have a profound impact on drug discovery and development as we aim to bridge the gap between pre-clinical promise and clinical performance.”