Management Team

Daniel Speidel

Daniel co-founded Breakpoint Therapeutics in June 2019. He brings the company over 20 years of experience in molecular oncology research with a focus on DNA damage responses and as a strategic advisor to the life sciences industry.

As Managing Director, he oversees Breakpoint’s operations and corporate development. Previously, Daniel served as Vice President, Initiative Leader Oncology at Evotec. In this role he led the efforts to spin off Evotec’s most promising DDR projects and form an independent company, which resulted in Breakpoint. Prior to that he was a Group Leader at Children’s Medical Research Institute and Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Daniel holds a PhD in Experimental Cancer Research from the University of Hannover and Heinrich-Pette-Institute (now the Leibniz-Institute of Virology) in Hamburg, Germany. A member of various governing boards and a former management consultant, he has worked with McKinsey & Company and others to advise industry and not-for-profit organizations on matters of strategic importance.

Jon Hollick

Jon co-founded Breakpoint Therapeutics leveraging over 20 years of experience in oncology research and drug discovery and development.

As Managing Director, Jon has overall responsibility for the company’s product pipeline and research activities. Before founding Breakpoint, Jon led many of Evotec’s oncology drug discovery alliances with its pharmaceutical and biotech partners. He was also responsible for platform establishment, building the DDR project portfolio and initiating early projects with several prestigious research institutions, including Harvard University, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, University of Oxford and Yale University.

Jon holds a PhD in Medicinal Chemistry from Newcastle University, UK and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He completed his doctorate focused on the discovery of DNA repair enzyme inhibitors in collaboration with KuDOS Pharmaceuticals (now AstraZeneca), a pioneer in the DDR space. Following postdoctoral research at the Universities of St. Andrews and Dundee, UK, he joined Cyclacel Ltd., where he led cross-functional R&D teams with activities spanning from hit identification through to candidate selection and clinical support.

Francois Aymard

Francois is a member of the founding team of Breakpoint Therapeutics and serves as the company’s Vice President Biology. In this role, Francois leads biology activities from target validation to preclinical evaluation.

He also coordinates the company’s collaborations with academic and industry partners. Francois has over 10 years of experience with DDR, and most recently as Team Leader In Vitro Pharmacology, he initiated and built DDR-biology capabilities at Evotec. He has played an integral role in oncology drug discovery projects focusing on epigenetics and genetic technologies critical to modulating DDR.

Francois holds a PhD in Molecular Genetics from the University of Toulouse, France, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), where he managed independent projects to investigate the interplay between DNA repair and epigenetic factors.