Tony De Fougerolles

ANTONIN (TONY) DE FOUGEROLLES, PhD ’93, immunology, is CEO of Evox Therapeutics based in Oxford, UK. Evox is engineering exosomes, the body’s natural delivery system, to develop the next generation of therapeutics by enabling a wide variety of drugs to reach previously inaccessible tissues and compartments. 

Tony has nearly 25 years of biotech R&D experience in building out drug pipelines, and he has played a key role in developing and successfully advancing 3 new drug modalities to the market (mRNA, RNAi, single domain antibodies) and in helping build several multi-billion dollar companies from start-up stage. 

Previously, Tony was chief scientific officer (CSO) of Ablynx, where he led the company’s non-clinical R&D operations and played a key role in the approval of the 1st single domain antibody drug, caplacizumab. Prior to Ablynx, Tony was founding CSO at Moderna Therapeutics where he pioneered modified mRNA as a new therapeutic and vaccine drug modality. He is the inventor of the mRNA chemistry and delivery systems that form the basis of both approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Prior to that, Tony was CSO of immuno-oncology company Tolerx, Inc, and VP of research at Alnylam where he helped develop RNA interference (RNAi) as a new drug modality, including overseeing development of the first approved LNP-based RNAi delivery system and the development of several approved RNAi drugs including inclisiran. Tony has been principal investigator on over $80m in grants covering infectious disease and pandemic preparedness drug platforms going back 15 years. He has over 60 scientific publications and is an inventor on over 100 issued US patents. He also serves on the boards of Evox Therapeutics and Walking Fish Therapeutics and is an advisor to MiNA Therapeutics, Chimeron Bio, and LIfT BioSciences.