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Relay Therapeutics Names Wolf as Chief Medical Officer
20 November 2019 - - US-based oncology therapeutics developer Relay Therapeutics has hired Ben B. Wolf, M.D., Ph.D. as chief medical officer, the company said.
Mrunal "Monica" Phadnis has joined as vice president of clinical operations and Iain Martin, Ph.D., has joined as vice president, drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics.
Dr. Ben B. Wolf is a precision oncologist who brings to Relay Therapeutics nearly 20 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, with expertise advancing new oncology programs in the clinic and optimizing patient selection to enable rapid proof of concept and registration.
He has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed publications and multiple patents related to drug discoveries.
Most recently, Dr. Wolf served as chief medical officer at KSQ Therapeutics, a biotechnology company advancing a pipeline of CRISPR-based tumor- and immune-focused drug candidates for the treatment of cancer.
Prior to KSQ, Dr. Wolf was senior vice president, clinical development at Blueprint Medicines, where he advanced three oncology programs for novel kinase inhibitors from investigational new drug applications to clinical proof-of-concept.
Prior to Blueprint, Dr. Wolf held clinical and medical director roles at Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, ImmunoGen, Amgen and Genentech. Dr. Wolf holds an M.D. and Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Virginia and a B.S. from Union College.
He completed medical training in internal medicine and medical oncology at the University of California at San Diego.
Monica Phadnis is an end-to-end delivery expert with more than 15 years in clinical oncology research. Prior to joining Relay Therapeutics, she was the executive director of clinical development in oncology and hematology at Syneos Health, where she worked primarily on early phase solid tumors.
Before Syneos, she was the director and clinical operations lead at EMD Serono, where she led Precision Medicine clinical programmes in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer.
Additionally, she held roles of growing responsibility at Quintiles Translational Corp., Sanofi-Aventis (NYSE: SNY), Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Selventa Inc.
Phadnis received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Mumbai in Mumbai, India and a pre-medical diploma with specialisation in genetics from Harvard University.
Dr. Iain Martin brings to Relay Therapeutics more than 30 years of experience in pharmaceutical drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics across therapeutic areas, including oncology and neuroscience.
Prior to joining Relay Therapeutics, he was executive director within the department of pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics and drug metabolism at US Merck (NYSE: MRK), where he led groups responsible for DMPK support of small molecule and peptide programs across the company.
Prior to Merck, Dr. Martin held roles of increasing responsibility at The Upjohn Company, AstraZeneca, Organon and Schering Plough. He received his Ph.D. in drug metabolism and a B.S. in biochemistry from the University of Surrey.
Relay Therapeutics is committed to creating medicines that will have a transformative impact on patients by building a unique discovery platform centered on understanding how the conformation of proteins relate to function.
The company said that, whereas prior approaches to imaging proteins have been limited to static pictures, Relay Therapeutics' approach overcomes this challenge by combining unprecedented computational power with leading edge experimental techniques in structural biology, biophysics, chemistry and biology.
This integration illuminates for the first time the full mobility of a protein and provides key insights into how the dynamic nature of a protein's conformation regulates function.
By applying these insights, Relay Therapeutics aims to modulate protein conformation to develop novel therapies for patients.
The company's initial programmes are focused on developing therapeutics in oncology. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Relay Therapeutics is a private company launched in 2016.
To date the company has raised USD 520m from investors including SoftBank Vision Fund, Third Rock Ventures, Casdin Capital, GV, BVF Partners, EcoR1 Capital, Foresite Capital, Perceptive Advisors, Tavistock Group and an affiliate of D.E. Shaw Research.
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