Welwyn Garden City, UK and Boston, MA, USA, 8 November 2011 – Heptares Therapeutics, the leading GPCR drug discovery company, is pleased to announce the appointment of Daniel Grau as President.  Mr Grau, who has been a Senior Advisor to Heptares focused on business development and corporate strategy since 2010, is based in Boston, MA and will have broad responsibilities for corporate and commercial development, reporting to Chief Executive Officer Malcolm Weir. He joins Heptares as it enters a new stage of growth and value creation, building upon a transformative year of pipeline breakthroughs and corporate deals.

Focused on novel GPCR-targeted medicines, Heptares has assembled a rich pipeline of first- and best-in-class therapeutic agents for serious neurological (CNS) and metabolic disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, anxiety, chronic insomnia and type II diabetes.  In addition, Heptares has signed commercial partnerships with leading pharma companies such as Takeda, AstraZeneca, Shire and Novartis.

“I am delighted that Dan has joined our executive team at Heptares,” said Malcolm Weir, Heptares’ CEO. “As a key advisor to the company over the past year, he contributed significantly to our business development deals and to defining our pipeline strategy.  Dan's leadership in corporate and commercial development will be increasingly valuable as Heptares’ pipeline progresses and as partnerships organise around defined regions of GPCR target space.” 

“Heptares is an exceptional company with a revolutionary and unparalleled capability for discovering medicines that target important yet previously challenging GPCRs,” commented Mr Grau. “Internally, we are concentrating on serious neurological and metabolic disorders and advancing programmes on high-value targets that are clinically validated, but for which no small molecule medicines exist.  Externally, we have the opportunity to become the clear partner of choice for any pharma company working on GPCRs, with the Heptares technology platform adopted as the basic operating system for GPCR drug discovery. I'm very excited to join the team and look forward to helping build the company.”

Mr. Grau is currently a member of the Product Advisory Board of Concert Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Previously he served as President and CEO of Cortria Corporation, Chief Operating Officer of CombinatoRx, Inc. (today Zalicus), and as a business consultant to Pharmacia Corporation (today Pfizer).  He earned his BA from Davidson College and holds an MPhil from Yale University.