20-year Industry Veteran Brings Extensive Experience in Drug Discovery and Development

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Ligon Discovery, Inc., which uses proprietary small molecule microarray technology to find drugs against high-value targets, today announced the appointment of pharmaceutical industry veteran Errol B. De Souza as Ligon's Executive Chairman of the Board.

"I'm very pleased to welcome Errol De Souza as Executive Chairman of the Board," said Patrick Kleyn, Ligon's chief executive officer and co-founder. He added, "Errol's breadth of experience in the life sciences industry -- particularly his leadership taking drug candidates from exploratory research through clinical development -- will be an asset to Ligon as we advance our current drug discovery campaigns targeting cancer and coagulations disorders, utilizing our proprietary small molecule microarray platform."

Dr. De Souza commented, "I look forward to chairing Ligon's Board, and contributing to the forward momentum being built by the company in discovering small molecule drugs against disease targets that others have found intractable. Ligon's unique and proprietary small molecule microarray technology offers compelling advantages, including broad applicability to all target classes, unprecedented scale of parallel screening, and minimal protein requirements. I believe Ligon has what it takes to leverage this already validated technology."

Errol B. De Souza, Ph.D. is a seasoned pharma and biotech industry leader with 20 years of experience in senior level Research & Development (R&D) and management positions at Aventis, Hoechst Marion Roussel (HMR), DuPont Merck, Neurocrine Biosciences, Synaptic Pharmaceuticals and Archemix. His R&D experience spans from leading large R&D organizations at DuPont Merck (Director of CNS Diseases Research), HMR (Senior Vice President and Head of Global Lead Generation) with worldwide responsibilities for chemistry, chemical development, biotechnology, high throughput screening and core research functions to Aventis (Senior Vice President and Site Head of US Drug Innovation and Approval) where he had worldwide responsibilities for managing the CNS, Immunology and Inflammatory Diseases pipeline as well as administrative responsibilities for the entire R&D organization in the US including the Global Drug Development Center.

Dr. De Souza's particular focus has been on the developing innovative approaches to accelerate progression of compounds from the candidate to clinical proof-of-concept stage and beyond through development of biomarker and pharmacogenomic strategies and utilization of imaging techniques. His experience on the biotech side spans from starting companies (Founder, Chief Scientific Officer and Executive Vice President of R&D at Neurocrine), to leading companies (President & CEO of Synaptic Pharmaceuticals and Archemix, Inc) and experience on several Boards of Directors and Scientific Advisory Boards of both public and private companies. In these capacities, he has successfully raised capital in both private and public environments and been involved in multiple collaborations with large pharmaceutical companies.

About Ligon Discovery

Ligon Discovery is a Harvard spinout that leverages a patented platform technology to identify pre-clinical drug candidates. The company's high-throughput microarray "chip" transforms the speed of the drug discovery process and expands the scope of new drug prospecting to include previously intractable targets. With funding from incTANK Ventures, the team has deployed the SMM technology, originally invented at Harvard University and further developed at the Broad Institute (founded by MIT and Harvard University) in Cambridge, and has established one of the largest small molecule screening capabilities in the industry. Using this facility, Ligon has successfully completed screens in the fields of coagulation and cancer, and is actively pursuing drug discovery in other areas of high unmet medical need. For more information, visit www.ligondiscovery.com.

SOURCE Ligon Discovery, Inc.

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