Amarin plans to drive forward the next phase of its commercial expansion with the major new appointment of Scott Curley to its UK and Ireland team as General Manager.

The latest appointment follows a positive recommendation from NICE for Vazkepa, which has given Amarin the green light to pursue significant commercial expansion.

In his new role leading Amarin’s UK and Ireland operations, Scott will initially focus on developing and growing Amarin’s organisational infrastructure to ensure the successful launch of Vazkepa. Scott is an enterprise leader with over two decades of industry experience and a proven track record of leading teams to deliver significant sales revenues in the UK and in the Asia Pacific.

During his career, Scott has experienced almost every local and global sales and marketing commercial role. He joins the Amarin team from global pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, where he rose through the ranks to hold several senior leadership roles, including General Manager of Hong Kong.

Alantra has appointed Drew Wightman as a Managing Director and key member of its global Healthcare team. Drew has more than 15 years of experience across the life sciences and healthcare sectors gained in both advisory and principal roles. During that time he has worked on over 40 closed transactions, including several landmark deals. Drew will be based in the firm’s London office.

Drew joins from AstraZeneca, where he spent seven years as a senior member of the Business Development and M&A team. During his time with AstraZeneca, he was involved in global transactions with an aggregate value in excess of $50bn, including strategic joint ventures, carve-outs, product divestitures, collaborations, structured investments and licences.

His experience covers the full span of the product life cycle, as well as various therapeutic areas and modalities. Prior to AstraZeneca, Drew was a member of the healthcare and life sciences team at EY.

HepaRegeniX has appointed Dr Andreas Busch as Senior Advisor. Andreas will help the company to further advance the development of MKK4 inhibition, a first-in-class treatment paradigm for liver resection and transplant.

Andreas has an extensive track record in facilitating innovation both in the pharmaceutical industry as well as academic research. Currently, he serves as a Chief Innovation Officer for Absci.

For over 20 years, he has held different C level and executive positions for a range of companies including Cyclerion Therapeutics, Shire and Bayer Pharma. During his 13 years at Bayer he oversaw the early drug development pipeline, from target identification to proof of concept in patients. In this time he also shaped Bayer’s overall R&D strategy.

OxSonics has appointed Jérôme Marzinski as its Chief Executive Officer. Jérôme is an experienced medtech leader, having held a variety of senior roles over a more than 25-year career, with significant experience in scaling venture capital and private equity-funded businesses in the sector, having completed 15 transactions and raised over €50m of growth capital. Jérôme is also an independent Board member of Cimon Medical, a Norwegian ultrasound specialist focusing on cerebral blood flow monitoring, where he was also the Interim Chief Executive Officer, helping secure CE mark clearance for the Company’s lead product under new Medical Device Regulations. Prior to this, he spent three years as Chief Executive Officer at Visiometrics, an ophthalmic diagnostic company, that has developed a breakthrough diagnostic for vision impairment and cataract detection.

Andrew Loucks, Head of North America Consumer Healthcare at Sanofi, was elected to the Consumer Healthcare Products Association’s (CHPA) Board of Directors at its meeting in New York City in November.
CHPA also announced that it welcomed 20 new member companies in recent months.  These new members reflect the association’s broadening landscape of representation in personal healthcare, including over-the-counter medicines, dietary supplements and consumer medical devices.

NDA Group has announced the expansion of the NDA Advisory Board with the appointment of Sigrid Klaar – a specialist in oncology.

Sigrid brings over a decade of experience working as a clinical assessor at the Swedish Medical Products Agency. With her background as a clinically active oncology specialist, Sigrid has the ability to assess data from a clinical point of view, keeping the patient and treating physician in mind.

Ubiquigent has announced the appointment of Dr Sheelagh Frame as Chief Scientific Officer to the Company’s Board of Directors. The appointment comes at a key stage in the company’s development and will help drive the progress of Ubiquigent’s internal portfolio of novel DUB modulators, associated drug discovery programmes and commercial services.

Frederique van Baarle is moving up to the management board of Lanxess. The Supervisory Board has appointed the 51-year-old as Labour Director. Frederique currently heads the High Performance Materials business unit, which is to be incorporated into a planned joint venture for high-performance plastics with private equity firm Advent. She will take up her new position on the Management Board as soon as this transaction is completed.