Al­most three years af­ter pick­ing up the ba­ton from Art Krieg to help steer Check­mate’s TLR9 ag­o­nist deep­er in­to the clin­ic, CEO Bar­ry Labinger is out.

Alan Fuhrman, a board mem­ber and chair­man of the au­dit com­mit­tee, has stepped in to fill the in­ter­im pres­i­dent and CEO role, steady­ing the ship with his back­ground in fi­nan­cial op­er­a­tions. A for­mer board di­rec­tor at Loxo On­col­o­gy, Fuhrman has al­so been CFO at Am­plyx, Mir­na and Am­bit.

The re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of work­ing with Krieg, the CSO, to pre­pare its mid-stage drug for ap­proval — and set up po­ten­tial com­mer­cial­iza­tion — will fall on a new per­ma­nent CEO whom Check­mate has be­gun a search for.

“Our strate­gic pri­or­i­ty is to rapid­ly ad­vance our vidu­tolimod clin­i­cal pro­gram to­ward mean­ing­ful clin­i­cal da­ta, and I am ex­cit­ed to lead the Com­pa­ny at this im­por­tant time,” Fuhrman.

Check­mate has es­sen­tial­ly all its eggs in the vidu­tolimod bas­ket, set­ting up com­bo tri­als over the years with PD-1 in­hibitors: Mer­ck’s Keytru­da, Bris­tol My­ers Squibb’s Op­di­vo and Re­gen­eron’s Lib­tayo. The idea is that ac­ti­vat­ing TLR9, a re­cep­tor that trig­gers a chain re­ac­tion re­sult­ing in pro-in­flam­ma­to­ry cy­tokine re­sponse, in tu­mors can fight can­cer even among pa­tients who are re­frac­to­ry to an­ti-PD-1 drugs.

Mike Pow­ell

Labinger led the biotech to Nas­daq with a $75 mil­lion IPO with that strat­e­gy, al­though many in­vestors ap­pear to have lost their pa­tience. The stock $CMPI, which de­buted at $15, now trades at $3.93.

No rea­son was giv­en for Labinger’s de­par­ture. Chair­man Mike Pow­ell wished him suc­cess in fu­ture en­deav­ors.

“Mr. Labinger’s res­ig­na­tion from the Board was not due to any dis­agree­ment with the Com­pa­ny’s op­er­a­tions, poli­cies or prac­tices,” the com­pa­ny wrote in a fil­ing.

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On the hunt for a better AAV capsid for gene therapy, Eric Kelsic’s Dyno Therapeutics has set itself apart with its focus on machine learning to help speed discovery. Now, Japanese drugmaker Astellas — fresh off a slate of gene therapy burns — is taking a bet on Dyno as it looks to the future.

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