Esteban Pombo-Villar

Esteban Pombo-Villar

Targimnume Therapeutics

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Dr. Esteban Pombo-Villar has over 38 years of experience in biopharmaceutical R&D and business
development leadership. He is currently Chief Technology Officer in TargImmune Therapeutics, a
privately owned biopharmaceutical company in Basel, Switzerland, focusing on the development of novel
targeted cancer therapeutics. As the former CEO in TargImmune, he established the company’s operations
in Basel, raising over CHF 50 million investment and leading development of the company’s technology
through IND-enabling studies. Prior to joining TargImmune, he was Chief Operations Officer (COO) and
Board Member at Oxford BioTherapeutics in UK and Basel, where he gained valuable experience in
discovery, development and manufacture of antibody-drug conjugates.
Dr. Pombo-Villar spent over 23 years at Novartis and Sandoz, the last 12 years in Business Development
and Alliance Management and as Head of Alliance Management at the Novartis Institute for Biomedical
Research (NIBR), establishing and managing alliances with biotech companies and academic institutions.
Prior to that he held several senior roles in drug discovery and medicinal chemistry for diseases of the
nervous system, being an early adopter and champion of novel technologies for drug design and synthesis
of potential drug candidates, including computational tools.
Dr. Pombo-Villar earned a PhD, MSc and BSc in organic chemistry from the University of Warwick (UK)
and was a visiting researcher at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) where he contributed to
early applications of computational methods to support organic synthesis, such as LHASA. He then
completed postdoctoral studies at the ETH in Zurich. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a
member of several scientific societies, and has completed executive business studies at IMD (MTE,
Lausanne), Harvard Business School (US), and the Tuck School of Business (Dartmouth, US)