Dr. Delyani has 13 years of experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry and has  negotiated over 20 collaborations, and licenses.  Since June 2006 he has assumed primary responsibilities for strategic alliance activities within the cardiovascular and diabetes/metabolism research group at NIBR.  Prior to joining NIBR, Dr. Delyani was Senior Director of Business Development at Kalypsys, a biotechnology company focusing on metabolic, inflammation, and oncology small molecule therapeutics and VP, Business Development for Quark Biotech.  In these roles, Dr. Delyani had primary responsibility for all business development activities including research partnerships and product licensing.  Dr. Delyani began his career at Searle/Pharmacia where he held positions of increasing levels of responsibility in R&D and business development functions, including Associate Director, Cardiovascular Research and Director of Technology Acquisitions.  Dr. Delyani holds a Ph.D. in cardiovascular physiology from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a M.B.A. from Maryville University in St. Louis.

Learn more about our collaborations

Growing up in Austria in the 1970s, Klemens Hoegenauer seemed destined to become a chemist. From his youngest days, he recalls tales of the often perilous experiments that his chemist-father conducted at home, unbeknownst to his mother, who was also a chemist. These days Klemens Hoegenauer works as medicinal chemistry Research Investigator II in Global Discovery Chemistry, and he is studying cell surface receptors as well as enzymes that may prove useful as drug targets for autoimmune diseases. He is taking a targeted approach, designed with safety in mind. For example, if one can treat, e.g., psoriasis by stopping only a few key inflammatory pathways, rather than blocking entire swaths of immune reactivity, one could reduce harmful side effects and enhance the therapeutic effect. Hoegenauer sees his work as potentially having a broad scope. “We want to find drugs to treat diseases such as psoriasis and perhaps inflammatory bowel disease and multiple sclerosis.”

Hoegnenauer holds a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna and studied chemistry as an undergraduate at the University of Graz. After his Ph.D., he moved to Cambridge, UK for a postdoctoral visit.

Igor Splawski radiates a curious mind. In an ideal world, he would like to know everything about everything. But if you didn’t already know that he is a biochemist with a Ph.D. in human genetics, you might mistake him for an alternative rock musician or a Bohemian poet. Wearing a white gold hoop in each ear and a gauzy shirt emblazoned with bright pink flowers, he bears little resemblance to a stereotypical scientist, if there is such a thing. As unconventional as he may appear, Splawski is a dedicated scientist with great empathy for those who have age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of vision loss in the developed world.

AMD is a degenerative eye disease, characterized by progressive deterioration of the macula, the part of the retina that provides sharp, central vision needed for reading or driving. There is no cure for either the “dry” form, which is gradual and more common, or the “wet” form, which is less common but more severe. The first effective treatment for wet AMD is Lucentis^®, marketed by Novartis and delivered through direct injections into the eye. As a Senior Research Investigator I in the Ophthalmology Disease Area, Splawski is leading two projects to find better treatments for both forms of AMD.

Splawski started his scientific career in Bulgaria at the University of Sofia, where he completed a M.Sc. in biochemistry. He later decided to focus on medical science and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Utah studying cardiac arrhythmias. His work to define new genes causing heart disease and related disorders continued at Children’s Hospital, Boston. To immerse himself in discovering medications and directly improving human health, Splawski left his position as an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School in 2005 to join the newly forming Ophthalmology Disease Area at NIBR.

Over the course of her career, she’s been approached by other companies with tempting job offers, but Karen Wang, Unit Head of Analytical Sciences US at NIBR, never had a second thought. “The whole environment here – from NIBR’s leadership to global department management down to my US group – has always encouraged me to do innovative research,” said Wang.  It’s the kind of “go-for-it” environment that animates Wang. With a passion for chemistry, proteomics, and biology, she enjoys collaborating with project teams and using technology in unique ways to solve challenging scientific problems. After more than 16 years at Novartis, Wang has provided critical support for a wide range of projects, and accomplished quite a lot.

The Analytical Sciences  unit provides support for hundreds of chemists and biologists across NIBR. About 60% of the unit’s resources are dedicated to core support: conventional analysis of chemical compounds (small molecules) and proteins (large molecules) using technologies such as chromatography, optical spectroscopy, biophysics (to determine purity and physical properties) and mass spectrometry, NMR (to determine the mass and structure of individual molecules). Another 40% of the unit’s resources drive research collaborations and exploratory research – developing new technologies and applications in applying analytical sciences to drug discovery.

Wang’s interest in science dates back to her college days in the 1980s at Beijing University, where she majored in chemistry. At the University of Michigan in the early 1990s, her Ph.D. work – applying mass spectrometry to cell signaling research and proteomics – inspired her to pursue research in the life sciences. Less than a month after completing her Ph.D., Sandoz (one of the companies that merged to form Novartis) hired her to establish capabilities in protein mass spectrometry.  There she began developing proteomics technology and others – part of the focus of her exploratory activities today – coming up with new, powerful techniques for discerning changes in cells between healthy and diseased states and against the new targets, technologies to help discover therapeutics.