Industry News: Nuevolution Appoints Ton Berkien as Chief Business Officer

Nuevolution A/S, a leading small molecule lead discovery company, today announced that Ton Berkien will join the company on January 1, 2014 as Chief Business Officer. In his role, Mr. Berkien will lead Nuevolutions commercial and business development efforts and as member of Executive Management, he will play a key part in the strategy planning going forward. His most recent position was at Takeda/Nycomed, where he was acting Head of Corporate Development/M&A.


In 2012, Nuevolution announced a new financing round of € 11 Million to catalyze the establishing of an internal pipeline of drug candidates addressing therapeutically important targets within Oncology and Inflammation. During the last 12 months, Nuevolution has applied its efficient and validated lead discovery technology and has identified small molecule compounds for the first 10 internal target programs and has progressed two of these into lead optimization.

“The appointment of Ton has been made at a strategically important point in time for Nuevolution. During 2014, Nuevolution will be in a position to out-license its first internal programs and further programs will rapidly follow.” said Alex Gouliaev, CEO of Nuevolution A/S. “We are very pleased that Ton has accepted to join us and look forward to benefit from his expertise in the commercialization of Nuevolutions internal programs.”
“I am very pleased to join Nuevolution at such an exciting time for the company. Together with the strong management team, I look forward to contribute to the company’s accelerated growth by driving the commercial efforts forward”, says Ton Berkien.

Most recently, Mr. Berkien served as Senior Director Corporate Development at Takeda Pharmaceuticals International GmbH, Switzerland, where he was responsible for several M&A transactions in the US, and Europe as well as in various Emerging Growth Markets like China, Brazil and Colombia. Prior to Takeda, he held a similar position at Nycomed Pharmaceuticals. During 2003-2007, Mr. Berkien was Director of Competitive Intelligence at Ferring Pharmaceuticals, where he was responsible CI project management in both the R&D and commercial organisation. Earlier, Mr. Berkien held Senior Manager positions at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Rijnconsult, KPMG and Gilde Investment Management. Mr. Berkien has a BA degree in Economics from the Saxion University of Applied Science in Holland, and an LSid from Harvard Business School/IMD/PwC.