11 September 2017 - - US-based biotechnology startup Vividion Therapeutics has appointed Diego Miralles, M.D., as chief executive officer and Richard Heyman, Ph.D. as member of the board of directors, the company said.

Miralles most recently served as president of Adaptive Therapeutics, a new division of Adaptive Biotechnologies launched in 2016.

Prior to that, Miralles served as the Global Head for Johnson and Johnson Innovation. During his career at Johnson and Johnson, he founded the Johnson and Johnson Innovation Centers and JLABS, a corporate incubator for entrepreneurs in the healthcare and life sciences industries.

Miralles also headed an entrepreneurial team within the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson and Johnson that created integrated care businesses and enabling technologies to transform the healthcare experience, improve outcomes and reduce healthcare costs.

He headed the Janssen Research and Early Development unit in La Jolla, California focused in pharmaceutical discoveries and early proof of concept clinical development.

Miralles joined Johnson and Johnson as VP of Clinical Development at Tibotec in Belgium, where he was involved in the development and approval of several drugs including PREZISTA and INTELENCE.

Prior to Johnson and Johnson, Miralles held research and development positions at Trimeris and Triangle Pharmaceuticals and was an Assistant Professor at Duke University Medical Center, serving as a scientist and an Infectious Disease physician.

He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California San Diego.

Heyman is former CEO of Seragon Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by the Roche, and Aragon Pharmaceuticals, which was purchased by Johnson and Johnson. He was a cofounder and chief scientific officer of X-Ceptor Therapeutics, which was acquired by Exelixis.

He has served as vice president of Research at Ligand Pharmaceuticals. He is the author or inventor on more than 120 publications and patents.

Heyman currently serves on the board of directors for ORIC Pharmaceuticals, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, UCSD Moores Cancer Center, Gritstone Oncology and Metacrine Inc. 

He was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute, working with Dr. Ronald Evans. Dr. Heyman received a Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Minnesota.

Vividion Therapeutics is a biotechnology company focused on developing innovative therapeutics that treat major unmet clinical needs using the first platform for proteome-wide ligand and target discovery.

The company's platform was spun out of the labs of Vividion's scientific founders, a team of experts in chemical biology and synthetic chemistry from The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.