Timothy B. Lowinger

Since joining Mersana, when it was a nascent start-up, Tim has served as Chief Scientific Officer, and in 2019 was named Chief Science and Technology Officer. Since the beginning, he has led all of Mersana’s discovery efforts and is a co-inventor of all of the innovative ADC platforms and pipelines.

Prior to joining Mersana, Tim had nearly 15 years of international scientific leadership and drug discovery experience in the pharmaceutical industry. Over the course of his career at Bayer Pharmaceuticals in the US, Japan, and Germany, he contributed to the discovery of more than 15 preclinical and clinical drug candidates in the areas of oncology, asthma, inflammation, virology, obesity, and diabetes. Most notably, Tim is a co-inventor and was the discovery project leader of the pioneering anti-angiogenic kinase inhibitor Nexavar (sorafenib), approved for the treatment of renal and hepatocellular cancer. He was also involved in the discovery of Stivarga (regorafenib), approved for the treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer. While Head of Chemistry for Bayer in Japan, he initiated and oversaw the discovery and optimization of PI3K inhibitors which resulted in the approved drug Aliqopa (copanlisib), a treatment for relapsed follicular lymphoma, and while Department Head, Medicinal Chemistry in Germany, he oversaw the optimization of the HCMV anti-viral program, which resulted in the approved anti-viral drug PREVYMISTM (letermovir), licensed to Merck US. His role at Bayer prior to joining Mersana was as VP of Chemistry Research US, where he led a department of 150 scientists in the areas of medicinal, computational, process development, and analytical chemistry focused on oncology drug discovery.

Tim has published and presented widely in the fields of synthetic and medicinal chemistry, polymer-drug conjugates and ADCs, and is a co-inventor on more than 50 patents. He holds a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Chemistry and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of British Columbia, and was a Merck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ohio State University in the labs of Professor Leo A. Paquette.

In his personal life, it’s a poorly kept secret that Tim is a fan of all things Japanese, from scaling Mt. Fuji to see the sunrise on his birthday, to finding the best places to eat okonomiyaki, or even to naming his beloved labradoodle Yoshi (Japanese for lucky).