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Larry Hamann is currently Co-Founder, President, and CEO of Interdict Bio, a new venture-backed biotech company based in San Francisco pursuing an innovative small molecule therapeutics platform for addressing historically undruggable targets.
Previously, Larry was Global Head, Drug Discovery Sciences at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, with responsibility for Medicinal & Computational Chemistry, Computational Biology, Omics platforms, Biochemistry and Biophysics, Structural & Chemical Biology, and Compound Management/Screening. Prior to Takeda, he served as Corporate Vice President and Global Head of Small Molecule Drug Discovery at Celgene, working across all therapeutic areas.
At Celgene, his teams also built a state-of-the-art platform for both molecular glue and heterobifunctional protein degradation therapeutic discovery and development, with several molecules from these efforts, including mezigdomide and golcadomide, now both in advanced stage clinical development.
Prior to Celgene, Larry held senior leadership roles at Novartis, and Bristol-Myers Squibb after beginning his career at Ligand Pharmaceuticals. In over 30 years of drug discovery, Larry has led or overseen teams responsible for more than 18 clinical stage compounds spanning multiple therapeutic areas, target classes, and modalities (including covalent inhibitors, RNA splicing modulators, molecular glues, PROTACs). Among these are the FDA approved DPP4 inhibitor saxagliptin (Onglyza™) for type II diabetes, and the FDA approved first-in-class HCV NS5A inhibitor daclatasvir (Daklinza™) for hepatitis C. Larry is a co-inventor on > 70 patents, co-author on > 90 scientific publications, served as a standing member of the NIH SBCB study section, and is an advisor to many biotech companies and VCs.
In 2017, he was awarded the American Chemical Society’s Heroes of Chemistry Award for contributions to the discovery of the combination of the pioneering hepatitis C virus inhibitors, which together demonstrated for the first time that HCV infection could be cured with only orally administered direct-acting antiviral agents. Larry was awarded the ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry Award and was inducted into the Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame in 2022. Larry obtained his PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Michigan.
