10 June 2019 - - Hans Bishop has been appointed as chief executive officer of US-based healthcare company Grail, Inc, effective immediately, the company said.
He succeeds Jennifer Cook, who has stepped down from the board and her role as chief executive officer for family health reasons.
Bishop has served on Grail's board of directors since August 2018 and will continue to serve as a director on the Grail board.
GRAIL also appointed Joshua Ofman as Chief of Corporate Strategy and External Affairs. In addition, Maykin Ho has joined GRAIL's Board as an Independent director.
The company also announced that Renée Galá has decided to step down from her role as chief financial officer.
During her tenure as chief executive officer, Cook led the company through the transition from discovery-stage research to advancing an investigational multi-cancer early detection test into clinical development and toward commercialisation.
In addition, the company has fully enrolled two of its population-scale clinical studies with approximately 115,000 participants, and initiated a third 50,000-participant clinical study.
Bishop has more than 30 years of experience in the biotechnology industry. He will continue to serve as the Executive chair of the Sana board of directors and as a director of Celgene, Agilent Technologies, and Lyell Immunopharma. Bishop founded Juno Therapeutics in 2013 and served as its president and chief executive officer until the company was acquired by Celgene in March 2018.
Prior to this, he served as an Executive in Residence at Warburg Pincus. Earlier, he was executive vice president and chief operating officer for Dendreon, Inc.
He also previously served as president of Specialty Medicine at Bayer Healthcare, senior vice president of Global Commercial Operations at Chiron Corp., and vice president and general manager of European Biopharmaceuticals. Bishop holds a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Brunel University in London.
Joshua Ofman, MD, MSHS, joins Grail from Amgen where he spent 16 years in several roles, most recently as senior vice president, Global Health Policy.
Prior to joining Amgen in 2003, Dr. Ofman was a member of the academic faculty in the Department of Medicine and Health Services Research, University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Dr. Ofman also served as senior vice president of Zynx Health Inc., a healthcare IT company and subsidiary of the Cerner Corp. Dr. Ofman obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley and his MD from the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine.
He conducted his internship and residency in internal medicine and fellowship in digestive diseases at the UCLA Department of Medicine.
In addition, Dr. Ofman completed a RAND/VA/UCLA fellowship in ambulatory care and health services research, specialising in technology assessment, and obtained his MSHS from the UCLA School of Public Health.
He is widely published in health economics and technology assessment, public health program evaluation, and health policy analysis.
Maykin Ho, PhD, has more than 30 years of experience in the healthcare and finance industries. She is a venture partner of Qiming Venture Partners and a member of the Biotech Advisory Panel of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong.
She is also a retired partner of the Goldman Sachs Group, where she served as senior biotechnology analyst, co-head of healthcare for global investment research, and advisory director for healthcare investment banking.
Prior to Goldman Sachs, Dr. Ho held various managerial positions in licensing, strategic planning, marketing, and research at DuPont-Merck Pharmaceuticals and DuPont de Nemours and company.
Dr. Ho serves on the board of directors for FibroGen, Agios Pharmaceuticals, Parexel International Corp., the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, and the Institute for Protein Innovation. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Ho received a PhD in Microbiology and Immunology and a BS from the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center.
Grail is a healthcare company whose mission is to detect cancer early, when it can be cured. Grail is focused on alleviating the global burden of cancer by developing pioneering technology to detect and identify multiple deadly cancer types early.
The company is using the power of next-generation sequencing, population-scale clinical studies, and computer science and data science to enhance the scientific understanding of cancer biology, and to develop its multi-cancer early detection blood test. Grail is located in Menlo Park, California.
It is supported by leading global investors and pharmaceutical, technology, and healthcare companies.