7 December 2018 - - Belgian drug discovery company Confo Therapeutics has appointed Frank Landolt as its chief counsel legal and IP, effective from 1 January 2019, the company said.

Landolt is joining the company from Ablynx, now a wholly owned Sanofi company, where he was vice president Legal and IP and a member of the executive committee.

He is a Dutch and European patent attorney and transactional lawyer, and was a key member of Ablynx's management from 2004 onwards.

At Ablynx he was responsible for the company's IP strategy and for securing its strong patent estate, and was also involved in negotiating Ablynx's various partnerships with leading pharma companies.

Landolt started his career in private practice in the Netherlands, where his clients included major pharmaceutical companies, as well as some of the top biotech companies and research institutions in the Netherlands.

From 2000-2004, Landolt was director of IP and Legal at another Belgian biotech company, Devgen, that was acquired by Syngenta in 2012. Landolt holds degrees in chemistry (Leiden University), civil law (Leiden University) and business law (University of Antwerp).

Confo Therapeutics is a VUB-VIB spin-off co-founded in 2015 by VIB and Capricorn Venture Partners with the support of MINTS, PMV, QBIC and V-Bio Ventures.

The company is building a portfolio of first-in-class programs based on its proprietary Confotechnology which makes use of antibody fragments or "Confobodies" to stabilize G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) in a particular conformation of interest as a superior starting point for drug discovery.

GPCRs are attractive drug targets in the treatment of many different conditions, playing an essential part in numerous life processes and influencing diseases.

In addition to developing its own pipeline, Confo Therapeutics is entering into revenue-generating drug discovery partnerships with select pharma companies, on GPCR targets which do not compete with its internal projects. The company has ongoing collaborations with Lundbeck and Roche.