Marcel Van Der Brug Email & Phone Number

Pasadena, CA, US

San Francisco, California, US

San Francisco, CA, US

San Francisco, CA, US

• Founded Character Biosciences to generate first-in-class therapies for inflammatory disease of aging, by first defining patient subgroups based on genetics, pathophysiology, clinical progression.
• Created and led all Character Biosciences preclinical and clinical strategies. Responsible for portfolio management.
• Established two therapeutic programs in AMD and discovery efforts in Glaucoma.
• Authored research protocols and was Primary Investigator on four clinical research studies, covering >70 clinical sites and recruiting >5,000 patients. This formed the foundation for our clinical-genomic discovery.
• Initiated strategic partnerships with academic institutions, managed CROs, to advance therapeutic molecules.
• Identified and established the first Pharma partnership deal with Roche/Genentech.

South San Francisco, California, US

• Small molecules for genetically validated targets in inflammatory, and neurodegenerative diseases.
• Led indication analysis and selection of inflammatory, neurological and other diseases for TYK2 and LRRK2 small molecule programs.
• Managed cross-functional teams, including target biology, genetics, chemistry, PK/PD. Enabled parallel therapeutic and companion diagnostic development.
• Enabled the development of a first of a kind companion diagnostic for the LRRK2 program in Parkinson’s disease. Led scientific partnership with Qiagen to develop the assay using next generation sequencing.

Nashville, Tennessee, US

• Co-Founded Clover Therapeutics as a subsidiary of Clover Health
• Co-Led the spin-out of Clover Tx as an independent drug development company focused on inflammatory, ocular and other diseases of aging

South San Francisco, California, US

• Early-stage Biotech startup with genetically supported drug development programs
• Novel pathway and biology discovery (lipid and lysosomal). Led biology discovery strategies for lipid biology targeted programs (APOE).
• In-licensing new molecule program diligence
• Novel pathway and biology discovery (lipid and lysosomal)
• Pre-clinical animal model development and PK/PD study design

South San Francisco, California, US

• Disease and biology expert across variety of diseases, based on human genetics and pathway analysis
• Managed external academic collaborations and commercial research organizations.
• Served on the Industry Scientific Advisory Board for PPMI (Michael J Fox Foundation).
• Metabolic and Ophthalmology disease; NASH/MASH, Geographic atrophy, neovascular AMD, Uveitis
• Target identification with human genetics collaborations, human tissue collection, RNAseq, eQTLs.
• Led patient selection, heterogeneity and biomarker strategy for preclinical metabolism programs and preclinical through PhI/II intermediate AMD programs.

US

• Noncoding RNA regulation of transcription and biomarker discovery
• Next-generation sequencing to examine the coding and non-coding RNA transcriptome in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease cases and identified splicing and expression differences

Bethesda, MD, US

• Novel gene discovery and functional genomics
• Identified quantitative trait loci for expression (eQTL) and epigenetic marks (CpG methylation; methQTL) in a large series (>500) of human brain tissues.
• Novel disease gene discovery and first examination of LRRK2 expression association with disease (with John Hardy and Andrew Singleton Lab).
• Designed cell and molecular biological studies to discover the function of disease associated genetic variants DJ-1, PINK1, SNCA) (Mark Cookson Lab).

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Neural Gene Expression

B.Sc. (Hons), Molecular And Cellular Biology