John Or­win tapped to lead Atre­ca; John Tsai takes Vas Narasimhan's old role at No­var­tis; Hal Bar­ron nabs Genen­tech's Kevin Sin

→ Atre­ca co-founder Tito Ser­afi­ni is pass­ing the reins to new­ly in­stalled CEO John Or­win, elect­ing in­stead to spend his time on the new chief strat­e­gy of­fi­cer role he cre­at­ed for him­self. Ser­afi­ni has a broad man­date over re­search, pre­clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment, tech­nol­o­gy and in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty at the biotech, which is fo­cused on har­ness­ing the hu­man im­mune re­sponse for next-gen im­muno-on­col­o­gy drugs. Now that he’s built up­on the con­cept and es­tab­lished a slate of pre­clin­i­cal as­sets with a pro­pri­etary dis­cov­ery en­gine — in­clud­ing a lead can­di­date ready for IND in mid-2019 — the board thinks it’s time to bring in some­one to scale the com­pa­ny up. With his ex­pe­ri­ence lead­ing biotechs Re­lyp­sa and Affy­max as well as work­ing for gi­ants like J&J and Genen­tech, Or­win strikes them as the right part­ner for Ser­afi­ni.

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