Clinical-stage biopharma Humanigen has announced the appointment of Adrian Kilcoyne (photo) to the newly created role of chief medical officer. He brings leadership experience from multinational pharma and biotech companies and a strong clinical background in internal medicine and public health medicine, having recently served as vice president of oncology global medical affairs, head of evidence generation and external alliances at AstraZeneca.

“Dr. Kilcoyne’s experience and knowledge in multiple areas, including COVID-19, CAR-T and other oncology clinical development areas, medical affairs, regulatory affairs, evidence generation, health economics and partnering, gives him a unique insight that can be leveraged towards Humanigen’s COVID-19, acute GvHD, CAR-T and other oncology programs with lenzilumab and ifabotuzumab,” said Humanigen CEO Cameron Durrant. “In addition, Adrian’s leadership in the external alliances arena will be instrumental in helping guide the progress of Humanigen’s pipeline and potential commercialization.”

Laura Carter has been appointed CSO of Gossamer Bio, succeeding Luisa Salter-Cid. Carter joined Gossamer in 2019 as senior vice president of research and translational biology after leading the development of immunology and immuno-oncology programs at Lycera.

Candel Therapeutics has named Carrie S. Cox chairman of the board of directors. Cox is currently the chairman of Organon and was previously chairman at Array Biopharma and a director on the board of Celgene. Before her board roles, she served as executive vice president and president of Schering-Plough’s global pharmaceutical business.

Quantum-Si, which is pioneering next-generation semiconductor chip-based proteomics, has named Marijn Dekkers and Ruth Fattori to its board of directors. Dekkers was the founder and chairman of Novalis LifeSciences and formerly CEO of Bayer AG and Thermo Fisher Scientific. Fattori was managing partner of Pecksland Partners and formerly executive vice president and chief human resources officer of PepsiCo.

Acepodia has appointed Thorsten Graef chief medical officer and Michael Brock chief strategy officer. Graef most recently served as vice president of oncology early development at AbbVie, and Brock joins the company from Wells Fargo Securities, where he was a managing director in the healthcare investment banking group.

Precision metagenomics company IDbyDNA has named Neil Gunn CEO. Gunn joins the company after 12 years at Roche Diagnostics, where he was most recently president and head of Roche Sequencing.

Carmine Therapeutics has appointed Don Haut CEO and a member of the board of directors. Haut brings more than two decades of healthcare experience to Carmine, having previously served as chief business officer at AskBio and Sherlock Biosciences.

Tom Klima has joined bluebird bio as chief commercial officer. He was most recently at Gamida Cell, where he served in the same capacity.

Jaguar Gene Therapy has named Joe McIntosh chief medical officer. He joins the company from Aruvant, a Roivant subsidiary, where he led development of a gene therapy for sickle cell disease as the company’s chief medical officer. Previously, he served as head of clinical development at PTC Therapeutics.

Former president of Merck Research Laboratories Roger Perlmutter has joined Eikon Therapeutics as CEO. Perlmutter spent eight years as head of Merck’s R&D group before stepping down at the end of last year.

Kathy Reape has been appointed chief development officer at Akouos. She brings over 20 years of experience in the pharma industry, including significant gene therapy translational and development expertise. Reape was most recently chief medical officer at Spark Therapeutics.

Clinical-stage precision medicine company Relay Therapeutics has named Patrick Riley senior vice president of artificial intelligence. Riley has over a decade of data science and machine learning experience from Google, initially in web search and user behavior analysis and later as a principal engineer and senior researcher on the Google Accelerated Science team. In addition, Relay has appointed Charles Ferté, formerly AstraZeneca’s senior director and global project leader of oncology R&D, as its vice president and lead for RLY-4008, a small-molecule inhibitor of FGFR2—a receptor tyrosine kinase that is frequently altered in certain cancers—and Tara O’Meara, formerly head of bluebird bio’s clinical development operations, as senior vice president of clinical development operations.

Clinical-stage biotech CohBar has named Joseph J. Sarret CEO and a member of the board of directors, succeeding Steven Engle. Sarret most recently served as chief business officer at Corium International and was previously senior vice president, strategic accounts at Solazyme.

LianBio has announced the appointment of Yizhe Wang as CEO and a member of the board of directors. He joins LianBio from Eli Lilly, where he most recently served as global brand development leader for Lilly’s oncology business. Previously, he was senior vice president, head of biomedicines and oncology businesses for Lilly China.

Centessa Pharmaceuticals has announced the appointment of Antoine Yver as chief medical officer. Yver brings over 30 years of global experience in the pharma industry. He joins the company from Daiichi Sankyo, where he served as executive vice president and global head, R&D oncology, and chair of the cancer enterprise.