Concerto Biosciences Announces Strategic Business Development Hire

Didier Vingadassalom, Ph.D., to Drive New Partnerships as Concerto's Senior Director, Business Development and Company’s First Employee Dedicated to Business Development

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Concerto Biosciences, a biotechnology company designing microbial communities that restore health to our bodies and our environment, announced today that it has appointed Didier Vingadassalom, Ph.D., MBA, as Senior Director, Business Development. Vingadassalom will focus on building partnerships across biotech and pharma that leverage Concerto’s rigorous discovery platform. He will be responsible for maturing the team’s business development infrastructure, evaluating co-discovery and co-development partnership opportunities, and helping prioritize internal technology development directions from a business development perspective.

With more than 15 years of experience in pharmaceutical and biotech drug discovery and business development, Vingadassalom has assembled cross-functional teams to evaluate partnering opportunities, guided successful R&D collaboration negotiations, and developed and implemented alliance management best practices to maximize the success, value and efficiency of partnered programs.

“Didier has both a deep scientific background and years of business development experience— a potent combination and a perfect match for Concerto as our first senior director of business development,” said Cheri Ackerman, CEO of Concerto. “Our science team already excels at rapidly discovering optimized microbial products with our kChip platform, and Didier will help us point that unique capability at pressing, high-value opportunities in collaboration with our partners.”

Prior to joining Concerto Biosciences, Vingadassalom was senior director, business development and head of alliance management, SQZ Biotechnologies. Vingadassalom also spent more than a decade at Sanofi Pasteur in various roles, including director of external innovation, leading scientific search and evaluation of partnering opportunities for R&D, and deputy director of discovery research on the company’s new pertussis vaccine program. In his early years at Sanofi Pasteur, Vingadassalom helped advance an investigational periodontal disease vaccine and monoclonal antibody program.

“Concerto is led by a dedicated, expert team that has a vision to change how the microbial world is viewed and translated into products,” Vingadassalom said. “The company is at a pivotal moment in its evolution. I look forward to driving company growth and major advancements as a member of the Concerto ensemble.”

A native of Guadeloupe, Vingadassalom received his Master of Science in biochemistry, Master of Advanced Studies in microbiology, and doctorate in biochemistry and microbiology from Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris. He holds a Master of Business Administration from Northeastern University in Boston.

Following a $23 million Series A fundraise, Concerto is currently diversifying its foundational discovery platform, kChip, across industries as diverse as healthcare, agriculture, and household products.

About Concerto Biosciences

Concerto Biosciences rebuilds microbial communities in, on, and around us to heal our bodies and our planet. Products that rebuild microbial communities do not yet exist because no one can map the vast inter-species interaction networks responsible for community behavior. Concerto’s founders invented kChip, the first-ever ultra-high-throughput platform to experimentally measure millions of microbial interactions. Using kChip data, Concerto can map interaction networks that reveal a new class of products it calls “ensembles”—combinations of microbes that work in concert to shepherd damaged microbial communities to health. Since launching Concerto in 2020, the team has assembled a human skin microbe biobank, measured >6 million interactions with kChip, and discovered an ensemble that corrects the microbial deficiency underlying atopic dermatitis. The opportunities are enormous: Concerto aims to become the premier inventor of ensembles across medicine and agriculture, reinventing humanity’s relationship with microbes.

To learn more about Concerto Biosciences, visit www.concertobio.com.

Robyn Jackson
robyn@rjcomms.com