Baliopharm / Management

Dr. Andreas Herrmann

CEO and Founder

Andreas received his Ph.D. in 1994 in biochemistry in the field of neurobiology and worked as an associate professor in the department of cardiovascular physiology at the University of Cologne.

In 1996 Andreas was cofounder of Cardion AG (Erkrath, Germany) where he was heading the R&D department until 2003. In parallel he was heading all antibody related research activities in Cardions subsidiary Cardion INC in Boston (USA). As part of the management team he was responsible for fund raising and for the CMC and preclinical development of biopharmaceutical compounds, up to final licensing of the lead compound to Roche.

Since then Andreas has (co)founded seven biotechnology companies which he also led as CEO, including Celonic AG (service company), Baliopharm AG, Probiocon GmbH (consulting company), Synimmune GmbH (bispecific antibodies, oncology), Alvotech hf (biosimilars), Valerius Biopharma AG (specialty biosimilars) and Icelandic Natura (Topica). In 2002 Andreas took over Celonic GmbH (Germany) and re-structured the company towards a profitable contract development and manufacturing company (CDMO) with about 30 employees in Germany and 60 employees in Basel (Switzerland). In 2011 the service unit of Celonic AG was sold and the remaining part focusing on the development of therapeutic antibodies renamed to Baliopharm AG (Basel). To further support the research activities, Baliopharm GmbH was founded in Germany with operations in cell culture, process development and analytics.

From 2013–2016, Andreas built up Alvotech hf, a leading biosimilars company based in Iceland with a 4-product pipeline and 14,000 sqm manufacturing plant and made 2 successful acquisitions, a license deal with a top 10 globally acting pharmaceutical company and other strategic initiatives.