Joseph Arron is sometimes referred to as the black sheep of his family. While everyone else is a professional musician, he was always more interested in science.

“I played music, but I was never that keen on pursuing that as a career,” Arron says, adding that his dad played in orchestras, his mom was the director of Carnegie Hall, and his brother is a professional cellist.

Arron is a maestro in a different kind of field — and now, genetic data will be the music to his ears as he leaves a 15-year career at Genentech to become 23andMe’s new CSO.

Kathryn Corzo — an oncology veteran and the program head behind Sanofi’s multiple myeloma monoclonal antibody isatuximab — is now in the C-suite.

The newest member at cell therapy player bit.bio as their COO, the longtime drug developer left Takeda (where she served, in turn, as the head of oncology cell therapy and then a partner in its venture arm) to join the small biotech. For Corzo, bit.bio presented a unique opportunity to try and solve issues that had been plaguing cell therapy — and one of the three reasons why she left Takeda.

Christina Coughlin loves cell therapy — pretty much defining her career since her postdoc days with Carl June in Pennsylvania.

Now as the new head honcho at CytoImmune as of Wednesday, the first-time CEO gets to work with a new type of cell therapy — CAR-NK cells, licensed from long-time NK cell researcher Michael Caligiuri and Jianhua Yu at the City of Hope National Medical Center.

And Yu is the sole member of CytoImmune’s scientific advisory board.

As Nitrome Biosciences — a biotech founded in 2017 to focus on a class of enzymes called nitrases — rebrands to Nitrase Therapeutics, the company is also bringing on a new CEO: Pierre Beaurang.

In Nitrase’s statement earlier this week announcing its new CEO, the biotech said that the founder and now-former CEO — Irene Griswold-Prenner — will stay on with Nitrase as the new CSO. And this new appointment comes in tandem with the biotech’s Series A expansion, where Bristol Myers Squibb became an investor alongside AbbVie and Sofinnova Partners, bringing the total amount raised to $45 million.

The departure of a number of CEOs is the prevailing theme that kicks off this week’s installment: In a stunner, Alnylam CEO John Maraganore announced that Yvonne Greenstreet will be his successor at the end of the year. Maraganore, the Cambridge, MA biotech’s founding chief executive since 2002 who has helped invigorate the RNAi space, will step into a consulting role until March 31 and maintain his presence in the company as a member of the scientific advisory board.

Bridget Martell’s first clinical trial was an unorthodox one.

Then a resident in internal medicine at Yale, she was given an award to explore a career in clinical research — which was how she wound up leading a Phase I study for a therapeutic cocaine vaccine designed to help overcome addiction. She ended up overseeing the trial from Patient 1 to Patient 110 and, in the end, the early trial was positive.

How rare is it to find a woman leading a micro- or small-cap biotech company? According to a recent survey, it happens less than 6% of the time. And all-female C-suites? Almost unheard of.

But on Thursday, Kojin Therapeutics officially tapped Luba Greenwood as its first CEO, completing an all-female C-suite. All of the biotech’s senior scientists are women too, as is the scientific co-founder. It’s a moment that Greenwood always believed would come.

→ In a development that just seemed to add up neatly given Medicxi’s involvement with Centessa, the brainchild of Francesco de Rubertis has named fellow Medicxi co-founder David Grainger as chief innovation officer. Diving in here at Centessa means that Grainger will cede his previous Medicxi responsibilities but he will “continue in a consulting capacity,” as confirmed by our Amber Tong on Tuesday.

Almost five months after emerging from stealth mode on a mission to leverage work being done in “flyover” states like Texas and Wisconsin, Sporos Bioventures has named its first official CEO.

Amit Rakhit left his role as president and CMO of Ovid Therapeutics to take the helm at Sporos, a Houston-based upstart launched by Genzyme vet Michael Wyzga, ex-MD Anderson chief Ron DePinho, BridgeBio co-founder Peter Feinberg, Tvardi Therapeutics CSO Jeno Gyuris, and entrepreneur Alex Cranberg.