NORTHBROOK, Ill., March 28, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Astellas announced the appointment of Tatjana Dragovic, J.D. to head, Ethics & Compliance. She will oversee Astellas' Ethics & Compliance efforts globally, with responsibility for all Astellas Ethics & Compliance team members.  She succeeds Catherine Wertjes, J.D. who is retiring after 18 years with Astellas and 33 years in the pharmaceutical industry.

"The Astellas Ethics & Compliance function provides tools and resources to empower and enable employees to maintain Astellas' commitment to the highest ethical standards," said Dragovic. "We believe that how we work is as important as the life-saving and sustaining products we provide, so we must always act with integrity complying with the letter and spirit of the law."

Dragovic joined Astellas in 2007 as senior corporate attorney and held positions of increasing responsibility from assistant general counsel to associate general counsel, litigation.

She was appointed to vice president of Ethics & Compliance for Astellas' Americas region in June 2014 and added responsibility for the group's operations globally in 2016. In this role, she not only oversaw compliance strategies and programs for Astellas in the U.S., Canada and Latin America, but also had responsibility for risk assessment, investigations, monitoring, policy & processes as well as compliance training and communications globally.

Dragovic began her career in 2000 at Sidley Austin LLP, where she represented a variety of pharmaceutical and medical device clients. Dragovic received her undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ill., and graduated summa cum laude from the Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

Wertjes joined former Fujisawa Healthcare, Inc. in November 2000 (which merged with Yamanouchi in 2005 to form Astellas) as an Associate General Counsel in the legal department and assumed the head of the US legal department in 2012. She was appointed the global head of Ethics & Compliance and established the global function in April 2016.

Prior to Fujisawa, Wertjes served in global in-house litigation and regulatory and compliance counseling roles at G.D. Searle & Co. (later acquired by Pharmacia and now part of Pfizer). A graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School, Wertjes began her career at the Chicago law firm of Lord Bissell and Brook as an associate litigation attorney.

About Astellas
Astellas is a pharmaceutical company dedicated to improving the health of people around the world through the provision of innovative and reliable pharmaceutical products. For more information on Astellas, please visit our website at http://www.astellas.us/. You can also follow us on Twitter at @AstellasUS, Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/AstellasUS or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/astellas-pharma.

SOURCE Astellas Pharma Inc.