Canada-based biotech Enobia Pharma has made two appointments to add commercial and manufacturing expertise to its senior management team.
Dr Jayant Aphale has been appointed as vice president, manufacturing and process sciences. Prior to joining Enobia Aphale was vice president operations and project/portfolio management at Acambis.
In this capacity Aphale oversaw multiple vaccine manufacturing plants, including current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) upstream and downstream production and a lyophilisation facility. Aphale was also responsible for R&D project management.
Aphale has also held director level positions at Wyeth Vaccines and Diosynth Biotechnology, a biologics contract manufacturing organisation (CMO). He was also a senior scientist, cGMP manufacturing at Roche Molecular Systems where he was responsible for technology transfer and manufacturing and release of heat stable enzymes.
In addition Julie Smith has been appointed as Enobia's vice president, chief commercial officer. Previously Smith has held positions at Jazz Pharmaceuticals and Genzyme.
Dr Frederic Farkas has been appointed as Synthetech’s director of manufacturing, having provided consulting services to the company since May.
Farkas has over 13 years' experience in manufacturing and supply chain management at Bachem Corporation, Novartis AG and Senn Chemicals Company.
Over this period he has worked on amino acid derivatives, peptides and active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing. His experience in pharmaceutical and fine chemical manufacturing management led to his appointment.
Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) has appointed Christopher Perley as vice president and general manager of its Devens, Massachusetts biologics manufacturing facility.
Perley will take responsibility for supervising the building of the Devens facility and will have overall management responsibility for the site and facility when it becomes operational in 2011.
Prior to joining BMS, Perley was vice president, network strategy at Wyeth Biotech. In this role he gained experience in biopharmaceutical process development, production, supply chain management and operations.
He has also held manufacturing and biotechnology process development roles at Hoffmann-La Roche and the Genetics Institute in Andover, Massachusetts.
Albany Molecular Research (AMRI) has named Dr Gergely Makara as director of chemistry for European operations.
In this capacity Makara will be responsible for all European chemistry products and services including custom synthesis, analytical services, medicinal chemistry, production and library design.
Makara has over 10 years of industrial experience focused on the development of compound libraries and lead optimisation. This has included time as the head of Merck’s Target Validation Chemistry group where he played a role forming the infrastructure for parallel chemistry synthesis and associated chemoinformatics.
Prior this Makara was director, hit-to-lead optimisation and chemical library development at Neogenesis Pharmaceuticals.