An accomplished scientist with rich experience in cell biology, animal models of cancer and inflammation, pharmacology and translational medicine with over 20 years of experience in drug discovery in both small biotechnology companies and large pharmaceutical companies.

Prior to joining ROME, Heike was the Chief Scientific Officer at Ribon Therapeutics, where she led the discovery and clinical introduction of two first-in-class monoART inhibitors, the PARP7 inhibitor RBN-2397 in oncology, and the PARP14 inhibitor RBN-3143 in I&I. Prior to Ribon, Heike was the Senior Director of Biology at Epizyme where, among other responsibilities, she was the project leader for the company’s EZH2 inhibitor program, tazemetostat, which was FDA-approved in 2020 as Tazverik . Before that, she was a research fellow at Merck and the biology project lead for the company’s clinical stage AKT inhibitor, MK-2206. Heike served on the Board of Directors of Civetta Therapeutics and is an author of more than 40 manuscripts in leading journals.

Heike received her Ph.D. in biochemistry at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena in Germany and completed postdoctoral training at the Harvard Medical School. She earned a B.S. in biochemistry at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany.