Genentech Exec Jumps Ship to Become CMO at Gritstone Oncology
May 3, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
EMERYVILLE, Calif. – Raphaël F. Rousseau, who created and lead Genentech ’s pediatric drug development group, is the new chief medical officer for privately-held Gritstone Oncology.
Rousseau, who has an extensive background in oncology and hematology R&D, spent eight years at Genentech. Now, he will join with two-year-old Gritstone, which was found by Andrew Allen, the co-founder of Colorado-based Clovis Oncology . The company’s initial goal is to identify and deploy therapeutic neoantigens from individual patients’ tumor to develop novel treatments for lung cancer.
When the company was formed in 2015, Gritstone’s therapeutic approach was said to sequence the DNA of lung cancer patients in order to identify specific mutations. Then, the company will choose the makers that will act as the best antigens to be identified by the immune system and become part of the immune system.
Rousseau joins Gritstone with a long resume of experience. While at Genentech, Rousseau managed a team of more than 60 scientists working on Phase I to Phase III trials of small molecule inhibitors, monoclonal antibodies, gene-modified immune effector cells and vaccines, and nanosize vectors. He also launched the iMATRIX master trial concept, an innovative Phase I-II multi-tumor, multi-drug collaborative drug development platform for patients with high-risk pediatric malignancies. Before joining Genentech, Rousseau was a professor of medical and pediatric oncology at the Université Claude Bernard in Lyon, France.
In a statement this morning, Allen said the addition of Rousseau and his expertise in clinical trial management, oncology and hematology, “will be invaluable as we advance our first neoantigen immunotherapy into the clinic in 2018.”
“We have made significant inroads toward our goal of combining multi-omic tumor profiling and deep learning to create personalized neoantigen immunotherapies for patients with difficult-to-treat cancers,” Allen said.
In addition to snagging Rousseau, Gritstone also promoted Roman Yelensky to chief technology officer, where he will oversee the company’s genomics, proteomics and informatics programs.
“Since day one when Roman joined as our first employee, he has been instrumental in developing our cutting-edge neoantigen identification platform. Under Roman’s leadership, the Gritstone team has characterized large numbers of human tumors at the molecular level. These efforts have generated a tremendous amount of data, driving deep learning and the construction of a high-performance model that takes neoantigen prediction to the next level. Roman has been indispensable in building this unique and powerful tool, and will continue to be instrumental in our research and development program as chief technology officer,” Allen said.