Heptares co-founder resurfaces as head of new UK drug discovery facility at Merck

Merck & Co (NYSE: MRK) UK unit MSD has today announced the appointment of Dr Fiona Marshall to lead its new discovery research facility in London, focused on early bioscience discovery and entrepreneurial innovation.

Dr Marshall joins MSD from Japan’s Sosei Group (TYO Mothers Index: 4565), where she was executive vice president and chief scientific officer and, more specifically, from UK-based Heptares Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that she co-founded more than a decade ago, and which was acquired by Sosei in 2015.

According to MSD, Dr Marshall is a world renowned expert in GProtein-coupled-receptor (GPCR) biology, an active area of drug research and has more than 25 years' experience in drug discovery. She led the first group to show that GPCRs could form heterodimers and has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers in the area of GPCRs.