Melissa Kemp, Ph.D., Wins the Council for Systems Biology in Boston (CSB2) Award Sponsored by Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Melissa Kemp, Ph.D., was named the winner of the third annual Council for Systems Biology in Boston (CSB2) Award, sponsored by Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, Inc. The award was presented this morning during the CSB2 2010 International Conference on Systems Biology of Human Disease.

"Sponsoring the CSB2 Award is a natural fit for Merrimack, as our company mission is to use systems biology techniques to understand a disease mechanism and then discover and develop drugs to optimally treat that disease," said Birgit Schoeberl, Ph.D., Merrimack's Vice President of Research. "We are proud to support CSB2 and talented researchers like Melissa Kemp who continue to help the systems biology field reach its full potential."

Dr. Kemp receives this award in recognition of her work developing approaches to measure changes in a protein oxidation state and integrate ROS signaling with signaling by kinases and transcription factors. Dr. Kemp is an Assistant Professor in the Biomedical Engineering department at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar.

"Dr. Kemp is an extraordinary young investigator at the intersection between engineering and cell biology," said Professor Peter Sorger, Chair of CSB2. "Dr. Kemp's promising work studying the complex connections between signaling networks that are most commonly studied in isolation is the essence of contemporary systems biology."

About the CSB2 Prize in Systems Biology sponsored by Merrimack

The CSB2 Prize sponsored by Merrimack is awarded to a young scientist for exceptional contributions to the development and application of innovative new modeling and computational methods as judged by their technical quality, broad utility and fundamental theoretical insight. This prize is presented by the Council for Systems Biology in Boston (CSB2) which builds local, regional, and national links between academic and industrial laboratories active in the areas of systems and computational biology.  CSB2 is dedicated to promoting quantitative, systems and synthetic biology in the Boston area and beyond by promoting interactions among academic and pharmaceutical laboratories, organizing international symposia and recognizing the achievements of promising young scientists and engineers. The International Conference on the Systems Biology of Human Disease (http://www.csb2.org/events/sbhd-2010) is a major annual symposium focusing on the application of network and systems biology to unmet medical needs.

About Merrimack

Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery and development of novel medicines for the treatment of cancer and inflammation. The Company is advancing a robust pipeline of engineered therapeutics paired with molecular diagnostics. Merrimack's first two oncology candidates, MM-121, partnered with sanofi-aventis, and MM-111, are in Phase 1 clinical testing with multiple pre-clinical development and research stage programs in the pipeline. MM-121 and MM-111 are investigational drugs and have not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or any international regulatory agency. The Company's proprietary Network Biology discovery platform, developed with the help of leading scientists from MIT and Harvard, integrates the fields of engineering, biology and computing to enable mechanism-based model driven discovery and development of both therapeutics and diagnostics. Merrimack is a privately-held company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For additional information, please visit http://www.merrimackpharma.com .

Contact: Kathleen Petrozzelli, Corporate Communications, 617-441-1043, kpetrozzelli@merrimackpharma.com; Betsy Raymond Stevenson, 860-984-1424, RaymondStevenson Healthcare Comms, betsy@raymondstevenson.com

SOURCE Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, Inc.