Francesco Hofmann appointed Head of R&D at Pierre Fabre Medical Care

Castres, July 9, 2021 - The Pierre Fabre Group announces the arrival of Francesco Hofmann as head of Research and Development for its Medical Care business. Reporting to Jean-Luc Lowinski, Managing Director of the Medical Care division, he will be responsible for implementing the Group's innovation strategy in pharmaceuticals (oncology, dermatology, rare diseases, health care), with the aim of contributing to the Pierre Fabre Group's raison d'être: "every time we take care of just one person, we make the world a better place".

Francesco Hofmann joins the Pierre Fabre Group with a rich academic and professional background in oncology.

With a PhD in biochemistry, obtained in 1993 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Francesco Hofmann began his career in Boston at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, where he conducted research in the field of cancer from 1993 to 1997.

In 1997, Francesco Hofmann joined the Novartis laboratory, where he held a number of management positions in the discovery and development of new anti-cancer treatments. In 2005, he became a member of the Novartis Oncology Leadership Team, a division that oversees drug discovery, translational research, data science and early clinical development.

Before joining the Pierre Fabre Group, Francesco Hofmann held the position of Global Head Oncology Drug Discovery since 2017, based in Basel (Switzerland) and Cambridge (USA), from where he coordinated the discovery and entry into clinical development of more than a dozen new cancer drugs.

At Pierre Fabre, Francesco Hofmann will lead an organization made up of multidisciplinary teams spread mainly between Saint-Julien-en-Genevois, near Geneva, and the Oncopole campus in Toulouse, where the Group's 2 innovation centers are based.

Francesco Hofmann's main mission will be to develop the Group's R&D portfolio in pharmaceuticals, through a combination of internal projects and external partnership opportunities. These may take the form of acquisitions or licensing agreements, along the lines of the collaborations set up since the beginning of 2021 with biotech companies Y-Biologics (South Korea) and ValenzaBio (USA).