Hemogenyx Pharmaceuticals plc announced that H. Michael Shepard, Ph.D. has been appointed to the Company's Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Shepard is a pioneer in modern cancer research. His work has led to the discovery and development of many successful cancer treatments including Herceptin/trastuzumab, an antibody used to treat breast cancer patients. Sales of Herceptin and its biosimilars currently exceed $6.5 billion worldwide. In his Advisory Board role, Dr. Shepard will draw on his many years of experience advancing antibody-based therapeutics from the development phase, through clinical studies and FDA approval, to commercial launch. He will use his expertise to advise Hemogenyx on the pre-clinical and clinical development of its lead candidate CDX antibodies. These highly specific CDX antibodies selectively eliminate hematopoietic stem cells and progenitors and a subset of acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), and promise to offer safer alternatives to chemotherapy and radiation as means of eliminating refractory/relapsed AML and patient conditioning before bone marrow transplants. In addition to his work at Genentech, Dr. Shepard built successful programmes at various biotechnology companies. He helped launch Canji Inc., the first company to successfully traverse the gene therapy regulatory framework to initiate a clinical trial with adenovirus-p53, a disabled adenovirus encoding the p53 tumor suppressor gene, for drug-resistant ovarian cancer. Shepard helped to engineer Canji's relationship with Schering-Plough, which acquired Canji. Likewise, Shepard was the founder, president and CSO of Receptor BioLogix, which focused on developing protein therapies to treat cancer, autoimmune, metabolic and other diseases, and was acquired by Symphogen. NewBiotics Inc., which Shepard also founded, invented a new class of therapeutics, called Enzyme Catalyzed Therapeutic Agents. That company was acquired by Kiadis Pharma.