— Hans Bishop, GRAIL Board Member and Former CEO of Juno
Therapeutics, Will Succeed Jennifer Cook —
— Joshua Ofman Appointed as Chief of Corporate Strategy and
External Affairs —
— Maykin Ho Joins GRAIL’s Board of Directors —
MENLO PARK, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–GRAIL, Inc., a healthcare company whose mission is to detect cancer
early, when it can be cured, today announced that Hans Bishop has been
appointed as Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. He succeeds
Jennifer Cook, who has stepped down from the Board and her role as Chief
Executive Officer for family health reasons. Mr. Bishop has served on
GRAIL’s Board of Directors since August 2018 and will continue to serve
as a Director on the GRAIL Board.
GRAIL also announced the appointment of Joshua Ofman as Chief of
Corporate Strategy and External Affairs. In addition, Maykin Ho has
joined GRAIL’s Board as an Independent Director. The company also
announced that Renée Galá has decided to step down from her role as
Chief Financial Officer.
During her tenure as Chief Executive Officer, Ms. Cook led the company
through the transition from discovery-stage research to advancing an
investigational multi-cancer early detection test into clinical
development and toward commercialization. In addition, the company has
fully enrolled two of its population-scale clinical studies with
approximately 115,000 participants, and initiated a third
50,000-participant clinical study.
“We are very grateful to Jennifer for her important contributions to the
company, resulting in the pivotal milestone of the recently presented
impressive data from CCGA that support advancement of GRAIL’s
investigational multi-cancer early detection test toward
commercialization. While we are disappointed to see Jennifer go, we
respect and support her decision,” said Catherine Friedman, Chair of the
GRAIL Board of Directors. “We are thrilled that Hans is stepping into
the CEO role to continue building upon this positive trajectory. Hans is
a widely respected corporate leader with significant experience building
successful companies and guiding novel products through
commercialization.”
Ms. Friedman continued: “In addition, we are delighted to welcome Josh,
an accomplished industry expert in health economics, market access, and
health policy with deep experience integrating innovation into
healthcare systems, and Maykin, a distinguished biotech leader with
unparalleled expertise in healthcare strategy and finance, to GRAIL.”
“GRAIL is guided by its bold vision to improve cancer survival rates by
creating a single blood test that can detect multiple deadly cancer
types at one time,” said Mr. Bishop. “For much of my career, I’ve been
involved in the fight against cancer, and during that time, I have seen
real progress for patients. However, cancer is still the second leading
cause of death globally, and I believe early detection is key to
changing that. I’m excited to step into the CEO role at a time where the
team at GRAIL has delivered such exciting results. I look forward to
working with the Board and the entire GRAIL team in this new role to
ensure a smooth transition as we advance our test toward
commercialization.”
Mr. Bishop has more than 30 years of experience in the biotechnology
industry. He will continue to serve as the Executive Chair of the Sana
Board of Directors and as a Director of Celgene, Agilent Technologies,
and Lyell Immunopharma. Mr. Bishop founded Juno Therapeutics in 2013 and
served as its President and Chief Executive Officer until the company
was acquired by Celgene in March 2018. Prior to this, he served as an
Executive in Residence at Warburg Pincus. Earlier, he was Executive Vice
President and Chief Operating Officer for Dendreon, Inc. He also
previously served as President of Specialty Medicine at Bayer
Healthcare, Senior Vice President of Global Commercial Operations at
Chiron Corporation, and Vice President and General Manager of European
Biopharmaceuticals. Mr. Bishop holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry
from Brunel University in London.
Joshua Ofman, MD, MSHS, joins GRAIL from Amgen where he spent 16 years
in several roles, most recently as Senior Vice President, Global Health
Policy. Prior to joining Amgen in 2003, Dr. Ofman was a member of the
academic faculty in the Department of Medicine and Health Services
Research, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of
Medicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Dr. Ofman also served as Senior
Vice President of Zynx Health Inc., a healthcare IT company and
subsidiary of the Cerner Corp. Dr. Ofman obtained his undergraduate
degree from the University of California, Berkeley and his MD from the
University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine. He conducted his
internship and residency in internal medicine and fellowship in
digestive diseases at the UCLA Department of Medicine. In addition, Dr.
Ofman completed a RAND/VA/UCLA fellowship in ambulatory care and health
services research, specializing in technology assessment, and obtained
his MSHS from the UCLA School of Public Health. He is widely published
in health economics and technology assessment, public health program
evaluation, and health policy analysis.
Maykin Ho, PhD, has more than 30 years of experience in the healthcare
and finance industries. She is a venture partner of Qiming Venture
Partners and a member of the Biotech Advisory Panel of the Stock
Exchange of Hong Kong. She is also a retired partner of the Goldman
Sachs Group, where she served as senior biotechnology analyst, co-head
of healthcare for global investment research, and advisory director for
healthcare investment banking. Prior to Goldman Sachs, Dr. Ho held
various managerial positions in licensing, strategic planning,
marketing, and research at DuPont-Merck Pharmaceuticals and DuPont de
Nemours & Company. Dr. Ho serves on the Board of Directors for FibroGen,
Agios Pharmaceuticals, Parexel International Corporation, the Aaron
Diamond AIDS Research Center, and the Institute for Protein Innovation.
She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Ho received
a PhD in Microbiology and Immunology and a BS from the State University
of New York, Downstate Medical Center.
About GRAIL
GRAIL is a healthcare company whose mission is to detect cancer early,
when it can be cured. GRAIL is focused on alleviating the global burden
of cancer by developing pioneering technology to detect and identify
multiple deadly cancer types early. The company is using the power of
next-generation sequencing, population-scale clinical studies, and
state-of-the-art computer science and data science to enhance the
scientific understanding of cancer biology, and to develop its
multi-cancer early detection blood test. GRAIL is located in Menlo Park,
California. It is supported by leading global investors and
pharmaceutical, technology, and healthcare companies. For more
information, please visit www.grail.com.
Contacts
GRAIL
Charlotte Arnold
650-255-1909
pr@grail.com