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Visterra Announces Appointment of John Weidenbruch as General CounselVisterra, Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company that uses its proprietary technology platform to identify unique disease targets and design novel therapeutics for infectious diseases, today announced that it has appointed John Weidenbruch as General Counsel and Secretary of the Board of Directors. "John is a highly experienced biotech general counsel and a proven leader who will complement our talented management team," said Brian J. G. Pereira, MD, President and CEO of Visterra. "John's perspective and insights, especially regarding commercialization, pricing and reimbursement matters, will be invaluable as we continue to build Visterra into a leading biotechnology company." "Visterra's proprietary technology has the potential to create novel therapies with unique characteristics to meet the increasingly important unmet needs in infectious diseases," said John Weidenbruch. "I am thrilled to join Visterra during this exciting time and look forward to supporting the continued advancement of the company's product candidates, VIS410 and VIS513, and promising product pipeline." John Weidenbruch has more than two decades of legal affairs and policy experience in the biotechnology industry. Most recently Mr. Weidenbruch was at Bigen, Inc., since 2010 where he served as Vice President, Chief Global Commercial Counsel. Prior to joining Biogen, he was Executive Vice President, General Counsel, Corporate Secretary, and Chief Compliance Officer at Idenix Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a public biopharmaceutical company, from 2006 to 2010. Prior to Idenix, Mr. Weidenbruch was General Counsel at Abraxis BioScience Inc. Previously, he spent more than ten years at Amgen, Inc., where he held positions of increasing responsibility in the legal and healthcare policy departments. Mr. Weidenbruch has a Bachelor of Arts from Loyola College and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. About Visterra Visterra is a biotechnology company that uses its proprietary Hierotope™ Platform to identify unique disease targets and design and engineer effective therapeutics. The company's technology is powered by computational tools and techniques, the core of which is Atomic Interaction Network (AIN) analysis, which uniquely identifies an area, or epitope, on the target site that is fundamental to its structure and function. This ideal epitope, or hierotope, becomes the target against which the company designs a novel therapeutic to effectively and durably combat the disease. The company is currently focused on therapeutics for infectious diseases, and its lead product candidate, VIS410, is a broad spectrum human monoclonal antibody for the prevention and treatment of both seasonal and pandemic influenza. The company's second product candidate, VIS513, is a human monoclonal antibody for the treatment of dengue that has been shown to broadly neutralize all four dengue virus serotypes. Visterra was founded based on scientific work developed in the laboratory of Dr. Ram Sasisekharan and licensed from MIT (News - Alert). For more information, please visit www.visterrainc.com.
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