Skip to main content

Rome, backed by Arch and GV, hires science leaders to hit targets in “junk DNA” Fierce Biotech

 


Rome Therapeutics has appointed David Proia, Menachem Fromer and Sarah Knutson to its scientific leadership team. The trio join the Fierce 15 winner as it strives to develop cancer and autoimmune drugs against targets found in noncoding regions of the genome.

Massachusetts-based Rome is looking beyond the 2% of the genome that codes directly for proteins and seeking out targets in the repeating sequences that make up 60% of human DNA. The focus is underpinned by evidence that the repeating sequences play a role in how cancer cells evade the immune system as well as in infections, autoimmune disease and neurodegeneration.

Rome, which broke cover with $50 million from GV, Arch Venture Partners and Partners Innovation Fund last year, has now put in place more pieces of the leadership team it will need to deliver on its vision.

Proia has taken up the post of VP, oncology. Rome hired Proia away from C4 Therapeutics, where he spent more than five years and rose to the title of senior director of in vivo pharmacology. Working at C4, Proia helped get IKZF1/3 degrader CFT7455 into the clinic in patients with multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Rome disclosed the appointment of Proia alongside news of the arrival of Fromer at the company. Fromer spent the past five years at Verily Life Sciences, a sibling company of Rome-backer GV and the research organization of Google owner Alphabet Inc., where he led the data science group. Rome has tasked Fromer with leading the development and build out of its proprietary repeatomics data and analytics platform. 

Knutson is the third new hire disclosed by Rome. Before joining Rome, Knutson led the biology team at RNA startup Twentyeight-Seven Therapeutics. Knutson formerly worked at Nimbus Therapeutics, where Rome CEO Rosana Kapeller held the title of chief scientific officer for eight years. Rome has hired Knutson as senior director, early discovery.

The new hires come almost a year after Rome added Merck Research Laboratories and Celgene veteran Dennis Zaller, Ph.D., as chief scientific officer. 

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/rome-backed-by-arch-and-gv-hires-science-leaders-to-hit-targets-junk-dna






Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can We Make A Vaccine Against Smoking?

  This segment sounds good but we need to be careful here or we end up where we started in 2021 vaccines becoming political. 
Post a Comment
Read more

Texas governor bans vaccine passports from being required in state ABC News

  Thats Right States like Texas and Florida got the Vaccine Passport Conspiracy from Del Bigtree.  https://abc7.com/politics/texas-governor-bans-vaccine-passport-requirement-in-state/10491161/ AUSTIN, Texas -- Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Tuesday morning prohibiting state agencies or political subdivisions in Texas from creating a "vaccine passport" requirement. Conversation has grown around  vaccine passports recently as an option that can be used for travel or even eating out . They are typically described as an app with a code that verifies if someone has been vaccinated or recently tested negative for COVID-19. They're already in use in Israel, and in development in parts of Europe. But Abbott shut that down as an option in the Lone Star State with Executive Order No. GA - 35 also prohibiting "organizations receiving public funds from requiring consumers to provide documentation of vaccine status in order to receive any service or enter any place....
Post a Comment
Read more

Anti-Vax Conspiracies strike back in the USA July 2021 Original Article

 Thumbnail credit by Jeff Holiday Production In the past few weeks the anti-vax lobby has ratcheted up the ante on their lobbying efforts. The event that kicked off this new wave of anti-vax scares was the "Knock on the Door rants" according to the Washington Post on a July 9th article they cited  rants by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Laurent Boebert in a political rally that sparked the scare. "Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) got the ball rolling Tuesday by comparing the effort to “ medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations .” Not to be outdone, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) took to Twitter the next day to offer her own Nazi comparison, labeling the door-knockers “ needle Nazis .” If anyone should know the folly of such metaphors, it would seem to be Greene, who just three weeks prior conceded in an apology after another wayward Nazi/coronavirus comment that “ there is no comparison to the Holocaust .” And it’s worth emphasizing that there is...
Post a Comment
Read more