Swiss biopharmaceutical firm Cytos Biotechnology has appointed Matthias Alder as Executive Vice President for Corporate Development and Legal Affairs and Cheryl Lassen as Vice President for Clinical Development. Philipp Mueller, Executive Vice President Clinical Development, will retire at the end of this month (March), but will continue to work for the firm as a consultant.
Alder has more than 19 years’ business, transactional and legal experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Most recently, he was Senior Vice President Administration, General Counsel and Secretary of Micromet, which was acquired by Amgen in 2012. Prior to joining Micromet, he was a partner in the Life Sciences Transactions Practice at Cooley LLP, a technology and life sciences-focused US law firm, where he specialised in representing biotech companies in strategic transactions with pharmaceutical companies. Earlier in his career, Alder was in-house counsel at Ciba-Geigy and Novartis.
Cheryl Lassen
Lassen joins Cytos from Novartis where she was Programme Leader for the global clinical development of the indacaterol programme, a product since approved by the US FDA, EMA, Japan and many countries worldwide.
In her 20-year career, Lassen has worked on a multitude of clinical development programmes and in medical affairs in the UK and in South Africa for companies including Bristol Myers Squibb, Abbott Laboratories and Pharmacia.
Cytos was founded in 1995 as a spin-off from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.