Five months after Be Biopharma launched with $52 million in Series A financing, the company tapped bluebird bio veteran Joanne Smith-Farrell as its new chief executive officer.
Five months after Cambridge, Mass.-based Be Biopharma launched with $52 million in Series A financing, the company tapped bluebird bio veteran Joanne Smith-Farrell as its new chief executive officer.
Smith-Farrell is joined on the executive committee by Chief Scientific Officer Richard Morgan, who most recently served as Senior Vice President of Immunogenetics at Editas Medicine, where he focused on genome engineering to produce off-the-shelf cell medicines for cancer.
Smith-Farrell will guide the new company as it builds on the research conducted at Seattle Children’s Research Institute conducted by company co-founders David Rawlings and Richard James. Be Bio’s focus is to build a new class of engineered B cell medicines that will provide direct control over the power of humoral immunity and transform the prognosis for patients across a range of diseases who currently have limited treatment options. B cells are prolific protein producers that can be collected from peripheral blood, have a programmable lifetime that could last decades, can target specific tissues, and have broad, customizable functionality.
Before coming to Be Bio, Smith-Farrell served as chief operating officer and business unit head of oncology at bluebird bio. At bluebird, she led the growth of bluebird Oncology from an early single-candidate effort into a leading oncology cell therapy business. Prior to bluebird, Smith-Farrell served as vice president of transactions at Merck and vice president of business development at Pfizer.
“Be Bio’s mission - to unleash the power of B cells, nature’s protein factories, on many of humanity’s most challenging diseases – is an inspiring and humbling journey to be joining,” Smith-Farrell said in a statement. “It has been a great privilege to participate in the birth of the first generation of cell therapies to come to market, and to witness, first-hand, cell therapy’s power to transform the lives of patients with devastating diseases. Be Bio’s aspiration, fueled by the broad utility of engineered B cell medicines to offer previously impossible solutions across a wide array of therapeutic areas, takes the potential of cell therapy to an entirely new level.”
Morgan said exploiting the intrinsic drug-like properties of B cells will allow Be Bio to make redosable medicines that have superior pharmacokinetic profiles, which can be administered without toxic conditioning regimens
“Be Bio’s ability to engineer B cells is a true paradigm shift in gene therapy that creates major opportunities to treat diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, infectious disease, and protein deficiencies. As CSO, I am excited to have the rare opportunity to shape the development of a new class of medicine from the very start,” Morgan said in a statement.
Prior to his time at Editas, Morgan also spent time at bluebird bio. There, he served as vice president of immunotherapy and led pre-clinical activities for bluebird’s first oncology medicine, the anti-B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA) chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy idecabtagene vicleucel (ide-cel), which could be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration later this month. Before bluebird, Morgan worked at the National Institutes of Health where he conducted research in the development of gene therapy for genetic diseases such as hemophilia, HIV/AIDS, and cancer immunotherapy.
