William Newsome
CEO Fibrocor Therapeutics
William Newsome is President and Chief Executive Officer of Fibrocor Therapeutics, bringing extensive experience across drug discovery, business development, alliance management and company value creation. Before joining Fibrocor, he served as Senior Vice President of Alliance Management at Evotec, following earlier roles within its business development team. He previously held positions at Eurofins DiscoverX and began his career at Pfizer. Throughout his career, William has developed a deep understanding of the global biopharmaceutical landscape, emerging technologies and commercial trends. He has led numerous high-impact initiatives, including shared-risk, integrated drug discovery collaborations that generated substantial partnerships and supported successful program implementation.
Seminars
Developing effective antifibrotic therapies demands translational strategies that extend and meaningfully complement conventional animal models. This workshop will focus on defining the translational path forward for FIB992, an oral DDR1 inhibitor, by integrating human-relevant preclinical models, patient-derived systems, translational biomarkers, and clinical insights from kidney transplantation. The discussion will highlight how these complementary approaches can strengthen target validation, support patient selection, establish proof of mechanism, and de-risk clinical development toward preserving long-term kidney allograft function.
Key Talking Points:
- Leveraging a patient-centric forward- and back-translation strategy to generate mechanistic insights and build a translational evidence package for FIB992 toward clinical proof-of-concept
- Establishing the biological rationale for DDR1 inhibition by integrating genetic KO models, human kidney allograft biopsy biobanks, and transcriptomic datasets to demonstrate that DDR1 expression and activation are associated with molecular fibrosis signatures, disease progression, and long-term graft dysfunction
- Leveraging human ex-vivo translational platforms, including precision-cut kidney slices (PCKS) and patient-derived kidney biopsies, to demonstrate FIB992-mediated reversal of profibrotic molecular programs, extracellular matrix remodeling, and immune–fibrotic interactions
- Establishing a translational pharmacodynamic strategy by developing robust target engagement assays to quantify DDR1 inhibition in preclinical studies, healthy volunteers, and kidney transplant recipients, and linking target engagement to modulation of downstream fibrotic pathways and molecular signatures
