Medigene appoints Dr. Thomas Taapken as Chief Financial Officer

Medigene AG / Medigene appoints Dr. Thomas Taapken as Chief Financial Officer . Processed and transmitted by Nasdaq Corporate Solutions. The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

Dr. Taapken contributes significant public company leadership experience, financing and strategic transaction expertise

Martinsried/Munich, Germany, 22 November 2016. Medigene AG (MDG1, Frankfurt, Prime Standard), a clinical stage immuno-oncology company focusing on the development of T-cell immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, today announced that its Supervisory Board has appointed Dr. Thomas Taapken as Chief Financial Officer (CFO) as of 1 January 2017.  As a member of Executive Management working at the Munich headquarters of Medigene, Dr. Taapken will assume the CFO responsibilities which were temporarily taken over by the Company's Chief Operating Officer (COO). Additional administrational tasks taken over from the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) will also be of part his duties.

Most recently, Dr. Taapken spent more than five years at Epigenomics AG, initially as CFO and subsequently, from October 2012, as its CEO/CFO. He led the company's efforts in gaining regulatory approval for the first blood-based molecular diagnostic cancer screening test by the FDA and oversaw its subsequent introduction into the US market. Before his time at Epigenomics, Dr. Taapken served as CFO at Biotie Therapies Corp. (now Acorda Therapeutics) and its predecessor companies for six years. His extensive international experience in the life sciences industry also includes over seven years as a venture capital investor at DVC Deutsche Venture Capital and San Francisco-based US venture capital firm Burrill & Company. Prior to that, he worked several years at Sanofi (originally Hoechst AG) in the United States and Germany, managing corporate venture capital activities, as well as in the areas of corporate & business development and research. Throughout his career, Dr. Taapken has been involved in numerous transactions spanning acquisitions, mergers and divestitures and helped to raise over EUR 100 m through private and public offerings for those companies where he served in executive positions.