Click Therapeutics has announced the appointments of Randall Kaye (right) as chief medical officer and Austin Speier as chief strategy officer. Kaye was most recently the chief scientific officer for SSI Strategy and CMO for Axsome Therapeutics. Speier was previously vice president, emerging technologies at Precision for Medicine.
“This is an exciting time to welcome Randall and Austin to our executive team as we continue to rapidly advance our product development pipeline,” said David Benshoof Klein, cofounder and CEO of Click. “Randall and his success as CMO of Avanir and bringing Nuedexta through development, FDA approval and launch will provide crucial industry knowledge and leadership. Austin's extensive strategic consulting and FDA regulatory experience, spanning over 250 life sciences companies and many first-in-class digital products, will be instrumental to Click as the company navigates novel and complex product opportunities with evolving FDA regulatory pathways.”
Infectious disease therapy developer Appili Therapeutics (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada) has appointed Armand Balboni as its first chief scientific officer. Balboni has over 20 years of medical and drug development experience and serves as a partner, senior advisor and member of the board of directors of the investment advisory firm Bloom Burton & Co., advising some of the most recent promising young Canadian biotech companies.
Aoife Brennan has been named president and CEO of synthetic biology company Synlogic. She joined Synlogic as chief medical officer in 2016 and has served as interim president and CEO since May. Prior to joining Synlogic, Brennan spent six years at Biogen in roles of increasing responsibility, most recently as vice president and head of the rare disease innovation unit.
Clinical-stage microbiome drug maker Second Genome has appointed Karim Dabbagh president, CEO and a member of the company's board of directors. Dabbagh, who has served as the company's chief scientific officer since 2014, replaces the retiring Glenn Nedwin. He was most recently vice president and head of the immunoregulation department and external R&D innovation for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases at Pfizer. Before that, he cofounded Modus BioMedicine.
Karin Eastham has been appointed as an independent director on Nektar Therapeutics's board. She brings more than 35 years of experience in the biotech industry, with particular expertise in finance and operations. Prior to her retirement in 2008, she served as executive vice president, COO and trustee of the Burnham Institute for Medical Research. Before that, she served as senior vice president of finance and CFO for Diversa.
Relay Therapeutics has announced the appointment of Linda A. Hill (right), the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration and chair of the Leadership Initiative at Harvard Business School, to its board of directors. She is the author of several leadership books and articles on leadership and innovation, including Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation.
Jens Holstein has been appointed as a board member of InflaRx (Jena, Germany). He has extensive management experience in the biotech and healthcare industry and currently serves as CFO of MorphoSys, which he joined in 2011.
Microbial genomics company uBiome has appointed former Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez (right) to its board of directors. Jimenez also presently serves on the boards of Proctor & Gamble and General Motors, and he served on the boards of directors of the Colgate-Palmolive Company from 2009 to 2015 and of AstraZeneca from 2002 to 2007.
Nimbus Therapeutics has promoted CFO Jeb Keiper to the position of president and CEO. Keiper joined the company in 2014 as chief business officer and was named CFO last year. He succeeds CEO Donald Nicholson, who will move on to entrepreneurial opportunities in what the company described as a “planned transition.”
Gene therapy company Tocagen has named Mohamed Ladha vice president, head of commercial. Ladha has over 23 years of experience in the fields of oncology and immunology, including leading product development and marketing teams at pharma and biotech companies. Most recently he led the US lung cancer portfolio at Takeda Oncology.
Synedgen has announced the appointment of Kaveri Parker chief business officer. She was most recently president and CEO of ID Genomics.
Harpoon Therapeutics has announced the appointment of Natalie R. Sacks as CMO. She most recently served in the same capacity at Aduro Biotec. Previously, she was vice president of clinical development at Onyx Pharmaceuticals and vice president of clinical research for Exelixis.
Entera Bio has named Arthur Santora as its new chief medical officer. Santora helped develop Merck's Fosamax (alendronate), one of the world's most prescribed osteoporosis treatments, before retiring in 2017 as scientific associate vice president of clinical research following 28 years with the company. He takes over for Eric Lang, who has been Entera Bio's CMO since January.
Privately held drug-aerosol therapeutics developer Breath Therapeutics (Munich) has named Peter Shadday chief commercial officer. He was previously global marketing lead at Vertex for the next-generation corrector programs for the treatment of cystic fibrosis.
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People. Nat Biotechnol 36, 1120 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4299
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4299