Over the past two decades, I’ve discovered and developed novel medicines across all of AstraZeneca’s major disease areas. 

My first degree is in chemical engineering where I became interested in enzymes and molecular evolution. During my PhD I worked on methods to evolve protein variants with novel functionalities in the test tube. I then started my career in biotech before moving into R&D leadership and from there clinical development.

At AstraZeneca, I first headed up the Global Technology Department. The innovative drug modalities that we worked on ultimately contributed to over half of our research portfolio. I then had the opportunity to take one of the resulting drug leads, a dual agonist peptide, into clinical trials and help transform it into a new medicine.

Today, my primary role is to lead a team of drug developers. We are probing human biology with a range of modalities (small molecules, peptides, anti-sense nucleotides, siRNAs, proteins, antibodies) across all our indications (cardiovascular disease, heart failure, kidney diseases, liver and metabolic diseases). We take on projects in pre-clinical and lead them to clinical proof-of-concept and Phase III transition. As Fellow of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge I supervise graduate students on protein design and directed evolution topics which keeps me close to the science that started off my journey.

What drives me every day is combining science and creativity to design new medicines that make a difference to patients.

Lutz Jermutus PhD Vice-President, Head of Project Leaders, Early CVRM

2017

MedImmune President’s Award

2015

Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of the United Kingdom

2013

Industrial Fellow of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge

CURRENT ROLE

Vice-President, Head of Project Leaders, Early CVRM

2013-2019

Served as Product Development Team Leader in MedImmune CVRM. The peptide drug candidate I am currently working on has potential across liver and kidney diseases. It was the first peptide drug discovered and taken through early development in AstraZeneca. I am proud that we were the first team to describe the pre-clinical and clinical efficacy of this dual-mechanism compound and were able to publish our data in Nature Metabolism and The Lancet.

2007-2013

Next in my career as Global Head of Technology in MedImmune Research, I led an R&D initiative to broaden the modalities we could use to create new medicines. Two decisions make me particularly proud because both went against perceived wisdom at the time: the start-up of a peptide team, using recombinant and synthetic approaches, resulted in four clinical leads for heart failure, kidney disease and metabolic disease. We also initiated a phenotypic screening team: we looked first for antibodies with interesting functions and then worked on understanding how they were doing it, resulting in two clinical leads in oncology and infectious disease.

2003-2007

During my PhD, I perfected a molecular approach for the design of novel antibody molecules. In my first industry position as Director of Protein Engineering, Cambridge Antibody Technology, I applied this technique to help create an antibody therapy targeting IL-13 which is now an approved medication for atopic dermatitis.

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