Leadership

Senior Management Team

Willem ‘Pim’ Stemmer, Ph.D., CEO, Amunix

Pim is CEO and founder of Amunix, which has pioneered microprotein technology as well as XTEN technology. Pim has repeatedly invented technologies that have lead to successful companies and products. Before, he founded Avidia after inventing it’s Avimer technology. In 1997, he founded Maxygen to commercialize the DNA Shuffling technology, now called Molecular Breeding, which lead to the founding of both Verdia and Codexis. Prior to Maxygen, Pim was a distinguished scientist at Affymax where he invented DNA shuffling technology. Before that, he worked on antibody fragment engineering at Hybritech. He completed post-doctoral work on phage display of random peptide libraries and antibody fragment expression in E. coli with Prof. Fred Blattner at the University of Wisconsin. Pim obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin for his work on bacterial pili/fimbriae involved in host-pathogen interaction. Pim has over 60 research publications and over 80 issued patents. His portfolio of patents from Maxygen was ranked as the #1 portfolio in pharma/biotech for 2003 by M.I.T.'s Technology Review, and #2 in a review of the 150 largest pharma and biotech companies by The Wall Street Journal in 2006. Pim received the Doisy award, the Perlman award, the NASDAQ VCynic award and has given over 250 invited presentations.


Volker Schellenberger, Ph.D., VP Drug Discovery

Volker has more than 12 years of industrial and biotechnology experience. Previously, he headed Genencor International’s Molecular Evolution and Design department, where he invented Combinatorial Consensus Mutagenensis, selection by micro-compartmentalization as well as mutator technology. Volker lead a team that constructed fusion proteins between antibody fragments and enzymes for application in cancer therapy. The constructs were optimized for high level soluble expression in E. coli. Prior to working on pharmaceutical proteins, Volker led projects optimizing enzymes for industrial applications as well as microbes for metabolic pathway engineering. Before joining Genencor, Volker was a post-doc with Bill Rutter at the University of California, San Francisco where he used substrate mixtures for the characterization of enzyme specificity. During 1991 Volker worked at the University of Göttingen where he developed a novel method for the production of peptides from recombinant peptide-multimers. From 1986-2000, he studied the use of protease in peptide synthesis at the Institute for Protein Research in Pushchino (Russia) as well as Leipzig University (Germany). Volker received his Ph.D. from Leipzig University in 1986 for studies on serine protease-catalyzed acyl transfer reactions. He is author of over 40 scientific papers and inventor of more than 30 patents. He is also the recipient of the Karl Lohman award of the German Society of Biochemists.
 

Joshua Silverman, Ph.D., VP Drug Development

Josh has been a key contributor to the founding and early funding of three start-up technology companies, with experience in building successful clinical programs and product portfolios.  While working at Maxygen, he was a key scientist in the development of the Avimer platform, leading to the spin out of Avidia, Inc.  While at Avidia, Josh was project leader for the lead anti-IL6 program from conception through entry into clinical trials, with the first human dose occurring 23 months after initiation of the program.  Josh was also responsible for all CMC and manufacturing at Avidia, overseeing a >$13M collaboration with Boehringer-Ingelheim for development of multiple Avimer products through process development and GMP production.  Based on the success of this program, Avidia was acquired by Amgen for $290M in 2006.  As part of Amgen, Josh was responsible for technology transfer and scale-up GMP manufacture of Avimer proteins, as well as continued development and optimization of the Avimer technology.  Josh obtained his PhD in Biochemistry from Stanford University in 2002.