Matthias Versele has 18 years of drug discovery experience at the intersection between academia and pharma/biotech.
At the Centre for Drug Design and Discovery (CD3) in Leuven (Belgium), he is currently responsible for the identification and selection of new investment opportunities from academic and biotech partners across therapeutic areas and for implementing a drug discovery approach for the selected projects in collaboration with CD3’s partners.
In 2017, Matthias Versele joined CD3 from Janssen (Johnson & Johnson), where he was an associate scientific director in the Oncology discovery group. He was a core member of the hematologic disease area stronghold, responsible for identifying and validating novel drug targets, and leading multiple discovery projects from hit identification to delivering development candidates.
In addition, he was the preclinical lead for Janssen during the clinical development of the covalent BTK inhibitor, ibrutinib, and contributed to the identification of clinically meaningful mechanisms of primary and acquired resistance, and the subsequent initiation of follow-on discovery projects.
He joined Janssen in 2006, after a post-doctoral training at UC Berkeley and a PhD in biochemistry at KU Leuven.