MaaT Pharma Expands Executive Team to Strengthen Corporate Development and Accelerate Expansion of Microbiome Data Science Platform GutPrint

Date : September 10, 2019

Jean-Marc Renard, MS, MBA, joins as Chief Business Officer 

Emmanuel Prestat, PhD, joins as Computational Biology Manager

Lyon, France, September 10, 2019 – MaaT Pharma announced today the appointment of Jean-Marc Renard, MS, MBA, as Chief Business Officer (CBO) and Emmanuel Prestat, PhD as Computational Biology Manager. Mr. Renard brings more than 35 years of pharmaceutical industry experience and will be responsible for corporate and business development initiatives for the company’s innovative microbiome therapeutics. Dr. Prestat will add his extensive experience in leading bioinformatics and data management projects and head MaaT Pharma’s data science platform, GutPrint®, to further expand its analytics capabilities. Jean-Marc Renard joins MaaT Pharma with over 35 years of experience in finance, commercial operations, business development and R&D from senior roles within world-leading pharmaceutical companies. Previously, he was the Vice President of Corporate Development at Sanofi Pasteur where he was responsible for global business development, M&A and alliance management activities. As Head of Sanofi Pasteur Transactions, he was responsible for the successful acquisition of Protein Sciences Inc. in a deal worth $750 million, and its integration into the Sanofi organization. Before that, he was the Senior Director of M&A and Strategic Projects at Aventis Pharmaceuticals before it merged with Sanofi-Synthélabo in 2004. Mr Renard holds an MBA from INSEAD and an MS in Biomedical Engineering from Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon.

Prior to joining MaaT Pharma, Emmanuel Prestat, PhD, was Associate Director of Research and Development at HalioDx, a diagnostic company developing tools for immuno-oncology assays. Before that, Dr. Prestat served as a Senior Manager of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics within the in vitro diagnostics department at QIAGEN. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow for 5 years on microbiome mining strategies at Ecole Centrale de Lyon (France) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US). He received a PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Lyon.

About Maat Pharma

MaaT Pharma, a clinical stage company, has established the most complete approach to restoring patient-microbiome symbiosis to improve survival outcomes in life-threatening diseases. Committed to treating blood cancers and graft-versus-host disease, a serious complication of allogeneic stem cell transplantation, MaaT Pharma has already achieved proof of concept in acute myeloid leukemia patients. Supporting the further expansion of our pipeline into larger indications, we have built a powerful discovery and analysis platform to evaluate drug candidates, determine novel disease targets and identify biomarkers for microbiome-related conditions. Our therapeutics are produced through a standardized cGMP manufacturing and quality control process to safely deliver the full diversity of the microbiome. MaaT Pharma benefits from the commitment of world-leading scientists and established relationships with regulators to spearhead microbiome treatment integration into clinical practice.

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Acting Chief Scientific Officer

Sheri Simmons

Sheri Simmons, Ph.D., is Acting Chief Scientific Officer at MaaT Pharma. Sheri brings extensive experience in biotechnology, particularly in the microbiome field, having held scientific leadership positions at Seres Therapeutics, Johnson & Johnson’s Microbiome Solutions team, and most recently at Seed Health, a leading probiotics company. In her role, she strengthens the Company’s scientific leadership, overseeing preclinical research, AI/data initiatives, and supporting efforts toward the Marketing Authorization Application of Xervyteg® in aGvHD.

Sheri holds a PhD in Biological Oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and completed an A.B. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude and as a Phi Beta Kappa member, receiving one of six awards for the best senior thesis in the sciences. Sheri holds a PhD in Biological Oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and completed an A.B. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude and as a Phi Beta Kappa member, receiving one of six awards for the best senior thesis in the sciences.

CEO and co-founder

Hervé Affagard

Hervé Affagard is the CEO and co-founder of MaaT Pharma. For the past 15 years, Hervé has been an intra/entrepreneur in the healthcare industry, after starting his career in IT in the steel industry. In late 2014, Hervé co-founded the company alongside Dr. Joël Doré, author of nearly 500 publications, and
one of the world’s most cited authors in the microbiome sphere today, after a professional career that spanned multiple industries. Hervé has led MaaT Pharma’s development from its early concept in 2013 and has been at the forefront of the development of the microbiome healthcare ecosystem in France and Europe. In January 2022, Hervé has been elected President of Allliance Promotion Microbiote, an organization founded in 2021 to support the microbiome sector development in France.

Engineer, MBA