Daryl Drummond, Ph.D. has been appointed head of research at Merrimack Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Drummond has expertise in the field of nanotherapeutics and has held various leadership roles at Merrimack, most recently as vice president of Discovery and team leader for Merrimack’s early-stage pipeline. Dr. Drummond was also integral in the development of ONIVYDE, which was recently sold to Ipsen for as much as $1.0 billion.

“Daryl’s successful track record of advancing programs from the discovery stage into meaningful therapeutics is exactly the kind of leadership that our research organization needs to move our drug candidates forward and achieve our objective to help cancer patients,” said Richard Peters, M.D., Ph.D., president and chief executive officer. “He will oversee a team of scientists who will continue to generate critical data for the promising candidates in our clinical and preclinical pipeline, consisting of engineered antibodies and antibody-directed nanotherapeutics.”

Prior to joining Merrimack, Dr. Drummond was director of Liposome Research and Development at Hermes BioSciences, a biotech company that was acquired by Merrimack in 2009.