Therapy Areas: AIDS & HIV
Smith-Farrell Named CEO, Chief Scientific Officer at Be Bio
16 March 2021 - - Joanne Smith-Farrell, Ph.D., has been appointed chief executive officer and director at US-based Be Biopharma, the company said.

Dr. Smith-Farrell will be joined by chief scientific officer, Richard Morgan, Ph.D., a leading expert in cell and gene therapies.

Be Bio's rapidly growing team of scientists, drug developers, manufacturing experts, and business builders is leading the creation of a new category of cellular therapies, engineered B cell medicines.

B cells are exquisitely designed by nature to embody a unique mix of functionalities, including prolific protein production, tissue targeting, and durable engraftment in cellular niches.

Be Bio was founded by Longwood Fund in October 2020 with a USD 52m series A investment led by Atlas Ventures and RA Capital, and joined by Alta Partners and Takeda Ventures to unlock this rich biology by precisely engineering B cells as therapies to develop a broad pipeline of potent and potentially curative cellular medicines.

Prior to joining Be Bio as chief executive officer, Dr. Smith-Farrell was chief operating officer and Business Unit Head, Oncology, at bluebird bio, where she led the growth of bluebird Oncology from an early single-candidate effort into a leading oncology cell therapy business.

Prior to this, she held executive leadership roles as Chief Business officer of bluebird bio, vice president of Transactions at Merck, and vice president of Business Development at Pfizer, as well as executive positions in public and private biotechs.

Prior to entering the biopharmaceutical industry, she worked in the healthcare practice at The Boston Consulting Group.

Dr. Smith-Farrell did her postdoctoral research in Biomedical Engineering in Bob Langer's lab at the Harvard-MIT Division for Health Science and Technology and holds a Ph.D. in Physics from The Catholic University of America and a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from Vanderbilt University.

Rick Morgan, Ph.D., joins Be Bio as chief scientific officer, and brings decades of experience as one of the pioneers of cell and gene therapy.

Most recently, Dr. Morgan was senior vice president of Immunogenetics at Editas Medicine, where he focused on genome engineering to produce off-the-shelf cell medicines for cancer.

Prior to that, he was vice president of Immunotherapy at bluebird bio in 2013, where he led pre-clinical activities for bluebird's first oncology medicine, the anti-B-cell maturation antigen chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy idecabtagene vicleucel (ide-cel)--the first CAR-T for the treatment of multiple myeloma filed in the US and Europe. He started his career at the National Institutes of Health, where he conducted groundbreaking research in the development of gene therapy for genetic diseases such as hemophilia, HIV/AIDS, and cancer immunotherapy.

He was a member of the team that published the first approved human gene transfer experiment in 1990, and was also the first to report the successful use of T-cell receptor gene therapy for the treatment of cancer in 2006.

Be Biopharma is in developing B cells as medicines, treating disease with the human body's native protein factories. These medicines are designed to be durable, re-dosable and administered without toxic conditioning, creating new avenues to halt or reverse severe diseases like cancer, autoimmune conditions, and enzyme deficiency.

Founded by Longwood Fund and B cell engineering pioneers David Rawlings, M.D., and Richard James, Ph.D., Be Biopharma is re-imagining medicine based on the power of B cell therapy.
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