→ Abbott Laboratories has named a successor to CEO Miles White after he announced that he was stepping down in March after 21 years of service. Robert Ford, the company’s COO and president, will take the helm. Ford is known for his work in the $25 billion merger between St. Jude Medical into Abbott in January 2017. White will remain with the company as executive chairman of the board. 

→ After snapping up Novartis’ Swiss facility, Novartis Center of Excellence, in July, Lonza has announced that their CEO, Marc Funk, is hitting the exit for “personal reasons.” Funk has been the CEO of the company for less than a year — brought onto the company back in March. In the meantime, chairman Albert Baehny will serve as interim CEO. 

→ And so the exodus continues. Sung Lee, who had been Gilead’s head of investor relations, was named CFO of Sangamo Therapeutics, a cell and gene therapy company. Lee had also helmed Gilead’s financial planning and analysis division. Lee is just the latest in a slew of exits that have followed John Milligan’s sudden resignation from the CEO role in July 2018. He had worked there for 14 years.

→ Two years after Zosano Pharma reported positive Phase III data for its microneedle patch system for delivering an old migraine drug — setting up a campaign to file an NDA — the company has brought on Steven Lo to the helm as president and CEO. Lo will be succeeding John Walker, who is retiring after 48 years in the healthcare industry. Walker will remain as the chairman of the board of directors. Lo most recently served as the CCO at Puma Biotechnology, where he helped with the launch of the company’s first product, Nerlynx — whose Q1 sales fell uncomfortably short of Wall Street estimates. In addition, Lo was the CCO of Corcept Therapeutics, where he led the establishment of their first product, Korlym, a treatment for Cushing’s syndrome. Earlier in his career, Lo held stints at Genentech and AstraZeneca. Lo’s appointment comes a few weeks after the company welcomed Dushyant Pathak as SVP of business development. 

→ Romesh Subramanian’s new biotech startup, Dyne Therapeutics, which is using oligonucleotides to degrade RNA responsible for disease has brought on Joshua Brumm as president and CEO. Subramanian will now take on the CSO role after launching the biotech as entrepreneur-in-residence at Atlas Venture. Brumm makes the leap after a stint as COO and CFO of Kaleido Biosciences, where he led the company’s IPO and helped bring its lead program into Phase II development. Prior to Kaleido, Brumm was the COO and CFO at Versartis. His other previous roles span Pharmacyclics, ZELTIQ Aesthetics, Proteolix, Citigroup Global Markets and Morgan Stanley. 

In 1999, while Dean Hum was an associate professor at Laval University in Quebec, Genfit reached out to him. An expert in the modulation of transcription factors and nuclear receptors associated with endocrine and cardiometabolic diseases, Hum jumped aboard the company as CSO and has been with them ever since, currently serving as the company’s COO.

He has now been appointed as president of GENFIT Corp, GENFIT’s subsidiary in the US — but will still retain his duties as COO — and will be moving from the company’s headquarters in Lille, France to Genfit’s US-based office near Boston.

→ After spending two years as entrepreneur-in-residence at SR One — the venture arm of his former employer, GlaxoSmithKline — Chris Roberts is back at the frontlines of biotech.

As CSO of Black Diamond Therapeutics, Roberts joins CEO David Epstein in driving their targeted kinase inhibitors toward the clinic. He will lead research and early development on the biotech’s MAP platform, which zeroes in on allosteric mutations of oncogenes. Its lead candidate, BDTX-189, targets EGFR and HER2 regardless of tumor type.