Christopher Conway has been appointed senior vice president of Discovery and Development and Global Commercial Sales at AMRI. Mr. Conway will head up the company’s global Discovery and Development Services (DDS) business, and will retain responsibility for corporate sales and marketing. He succeeds Michael A. Luther, Ph.D., who is leaving the company to pursue other opportunities.

“Chris is the ideal choice to direct the next phase of AMRI’s DDS growth and development,” said William S. Marth, president and chief executive officer, AMRI. “Chris brings deep knowledge of AMRI’s discovery and development operations and strong commercial sales and marketing experience to the role. Since joining AMRI in 2008, Chris has consistently demonstrated his commercial and strategic leadership abilities generating value for AMRI’s customers while driving top and bottom line growth across all of AMRI’s business units in Discovery, Development, API, and Drug Product. We thank Dr. Luther for his efforts in moving the DDS business forward during the last two years and wish him the best in his future endeavors.”

Mr. Conway joined the company in 2008 as a business development manager with the U.S. discovery team. He was promoted to senior director of the North America discovery market in 2010 and then to vice president of business development in 2012. Most recently, he served as senior vice president, Global Sales and Marketing. Before joining AMRI, Mr. Conway held sales and leadership positions of increasing responsibility at Johnson and Johnson and completed J&J’s Commercial Leadership Development Program.

Also, Rory Curtis, Ph.D., has joined the company as vice president of Discovery Biology and Pharmacology. Dr. Curtis will also serve as the site head with responsibility for scientific operations at AMRI’s Buffalo, NY location.

Dr. Curtis most recently served as senior director of Human Diseases in Discovery at Cubist Pharmaceuticals, where he developed Cubist’s antibacterial drug discovery into new disease areas such as pain, inflammation and gastro-intestinal disease. Prior to that, he was senior director of research at Elixir Pharmaceuticals, where he built a drug discovery platform developing small molecules to target diseases of aging. Dr. Curtis also held positions of increasing responsibility at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, focused on the discovery of novel genes as drug targets and developing high-throughput screens.