Dr Simon Moroney, CEO, MorphoSys

Simon Moroney talks to Fintan Walton about the founding and history of MorphoSys, its alliance management model and the challenges of maintaining successful partnerships in parallel with internal drug development programmes. They discuss MorphoSys' long-term strategic partnership with Roche and the rewards that the relationship has brought both companies, as well as the company's strategy going forward. Dr Moroney also outlines MorphoSys’ drug development programme and the strategic reasoning behind the company’s decision to drive growth by business acquisitions in the US. Finally, the impact that the recent consolidation of mid-sized German pharmaceutical companies might have on MorphoSys ongoing scheme of operations is discussed.

About Simon Moroney

Dr Simon E Moroney is one of MorphoSys’s co-founders. He studied chemistry in his native New Zealand, and was a Commonwealth Scholar to the University of Oxford, where he completed a DPhil in Chemistry in 1984. Before co-founding MorphoSys in 1992, Dr Moroney held positions at the University of Cambridge, UK, at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and in the Chemistry Department of the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. Subsequently he was an Associate in the Harvard Medical School, Boston, US, and an employee of ImmunoGen, where he worked on the development of antibody-based cancer drugs.
In 2002, Dr Moroney was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz am Bande (Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany) for his services to the biotechnology industry.