19 February 2019 - - US-based biotechnology company Nimbus Therapeutics has appointed Peter Tummino, Ph.D., to chief scientific officer, the company said.

Tummino brings to Nimbus over 25 years of experience in drug discovery across a range of therapeutic areas, most recently in his role as vice president and Global Head of Lead Discovery at Janssen.

Prior to Nimbus, Tummino was vice president and Global Head of Lead Discovery in Discovery Sciences at Janssen, the Johnson and Johnson Pharmaceuticals Group.

Tummino led multiple aspects of discovery operations with teams located in Europe and both coasts of the US, working across all five therapeutic areas at Janssen.

Prior to joining Janssen in 2014, he held multiple leadership roles at GlaxoSmithKline, including Head of Biology for the Cancer Epigenetics Discovery Performance Unit, where his team progressed first-in-class epigenetic agents into oncology clinical trials against multiple novel targets.

Earlier in his GSK tenure, Tummino contributed to the discovery and progression of multiple clinical candidates, including dabrafenib (BRAF inhibitor) and trametinib (MEK inhibitor) which were approved for multiple oncology indications. During this time, Dr. Tummino also co-led the novel target selection effort for GSK Oncology.

Tummino received his Ph.D. from the Department of Biological Chemistry at the University of Michigan in 1992.

Following completion of a postdoctoral fellowship at Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis, Dr. Tummino held positions of increasing responsibility at Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis, AstraZeneca, and Millennium Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Tummino has published 77 peer-reviewed journal articles with greater than 9000 citations.

Nimbus Therapeutics is a biotechnology company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nimbus is advancing the application of highly-advanced computational technologies to the design and development of novel treatments for substantial and underserved human diseases.

The company's focus on metabolic diseases, cancer and immune-inflammatory disorders reflects the mechanistic relationship between these disorders, and Nimbus' ability to rapidly tackle well validated targets as well as those that have proven intractable to others.

The company's LLC/subsidiary architecture enables diverse and synergistic partnerships to deliver breakthrough medicines.