Evotec : Aurobac Therapeutics Appoints Florence Séjourné as Chief Executive Officer

Lyon, France, October 4, 2022:
Aurobac Therapeutics SAS (Aurobac), announced today the appointment of Florence Séjourné as Chief Executive Officer. Aurobac is a joint venture recently created by Boehringer Ingelheim, Evotec SE and bioMérieux, focusing on the development of a new precision medicine approach, from diagnosis to cure to fight Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR).

"Florence's is an experienced biotech leader with outstanding strategic and operational acumen. The Board has great confidence in her to successfully set-up and lead Aurobac," said Frank Kalkbrenner, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Member of the Board of Aurobac. "We are excited to welcome Florence to Aurobac and look forward to her building a strong team under her leadership to put Aurobac on track for growth and success."

Mrs. Séjourné brings 25 years of biotech experience, most recently in leadership roles in the field of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). She is founder and board member of the BEAM Alliance, an association representing European biotechs developing new solutions to fight against AMR. Further she has been actively involved in advocating for biopharmaceutical small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) compatible policies with worldwide stakeholders to stimulate much needed innovation in AMR for the last 8 years.

She joins Aurobac from Da Volterra, where she served as CEO and brought the company from bench scientific concepts to late-clinical stage, developing products to protect the intestinal microbiota from the deleterious effects of antibiotics, including prevention of infections and antibacterial resistance. Prior to this role, Mrs Séjourné co-founded and worked as CBO/COO of Genfit (GNFT), a biotech company focused on metabolic and liver related diseases. She holds engineering and pharmaceutical sciences degrees from MINES ParisTech and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"Aurobac has the remarkable ambition to become a worldwide leader in AMR innovation with a unique combination of the best capabilities of the three founding companies towards developing a new precision medicine approach, from diagnosis to cure" said Mrs. Séjourné. "I am thrilled to join the initiative next to the founding partners and transform this fantastic vision into new drugs for patients."

About Aurobac Therapeutics

Aurobac Therapeutics is a biotech company founded as a joint venture by Boehringer Ingelheim, a leading research-driven biopharmaceutical company, the life science company Evotec SE and bioMérieux, a world leader in in vitro diagnostics, to create the next generation of antimicrobials along with actionable diagnostics to fight Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR).

Aurobac plans to work to shift the strategy related to antibiotic treatment regimens, which at the moment leans heavily on empirical approaches using broad-spectrum and unfocused medicines. The goal is to turn this into a precision approach, using new highly effective and targeted modalities, combined with rapid and actionable diagnostics to quickly identify pathogens and their resistance patterns, and supported by new economic models.

Funded by Boehringer Ingelheim as lead investor with 30 million EUR and by Evotec and bioMérieux with 5 million EUR each, the 40 million EUR joint venture, which has its headquarters in Lyon (France), combines the world leading expertise of Evotec, one of the most active research companies in infectious diseases, with bioMérieux' market-leading expertise in infectious disease diagnostics and with Boehringer Ingelheim's broad drug discovery and significant clinical development capabilities.

Contact : Florence Séjourné, CEO - [e-mail]