Tessa Therapeutics appoints ex-Takeda executive as CEO

SINGAPORE biotech Tessa Therapeutics on Monday (Aug 22) named a new CEO and president, Thomas Willemsen, a former Asia-Pacific senior vice president at Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical Company.

He takes over the helm from John Ng, who had served as Tessa’s acting CEO since Nov 2021 and will continue as chief technical officer of the Temasek-backed company.

Willemsen, who has over 25 years of industry experience, in his most recent role led the transformation of Takeda across 10 markets and enhanced its focus on rare and genetic diseases, oncology and vaccines.

Prior to that, he served as vice-president for oncology at GlaxoSmithKline for its intercontinental and emerging markets business, as well as GSK’s chairman and general manager in China. He also spent 12 years with Merck in Asia-Pacific, and as the head of its German oncology unit.

As CEO and president of Tessa, Willemsen will focus on maximising the company’s clinical development of immune cell therapies for cancer. He will be based in Tessa’s global headquarters in Singapore.

Founded in 2012, Tessa is a player in the niche field of CAR-T therapy, where a patient’s immune cells are harvested, engineered to target cancer cells and infused back in the patient – in what is known as the “autologous” method. The company’s lead asset, dubbed TT11, targets relapsed or refractory classical Hodgkin lymphoma.

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Another key Tessa programme is TT11X, based on its proprietary platform that can produce allogenic – or “off-the-shelf” cell therapies. This could make CAR-T therapy more scalable and accessible, as opposed to the highly-personalised autologous method.

“Tessa is at the forefront of developing the next generation of CAR-T therapies, including our allogeneic... technology, which has demonstrated very encouraging safety and efficacy data in the ongoing Phase 1/2 clinical trial,” said Willemsen.

The company most recently raised US$126 million in a Series A funding round led by US healthcare investor Polaris Partners in June. Existing investors Temasek, EDBI, Heliconia Capital and Heritas Capital also participated in the round.