SOMERVILLE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Finch Therapeutics Group, Inc. (Finch), a clinical-stage microbiome therapeutics company, announced today that it has appointed Ulrich Thienel, Ph.D., M.D., as Chief Medical Officer and Gregory Perry as Chief Financial Officer. Dr. Thienel will lead the clinical development of Finch’s Full-Spectrum Microbiota™ and Rationally-Selected Microbiota™ platforms, while Mr. Perry will provide strategic financial and operational leadership at Finch.
Dr. Thienel joins Finch with more than 20 years of experience successfully leading drug development programs for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, including RRD International, Takeda, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Johnson & Johnson. Dr. Thienel’s development experience spans multiple therapeutic areas, including gastrointestinal, immunology, central nervous system, hematology, respiratory, and rare diseases. Throughout his career, Dr. Thienel has engaged in ten investigational new drug applications (INDs), two new drug applications (NDAs) and three biologics license applications (BLAs). He completed his M.D. and Ph.D. in Germany and a fellowship in rheumatology at Columbia University, New York.
Mr. Perry brings more than 20 years of corporate finance experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, including leading the acquisition of three companies and raising $1 billion of capital in ten transactions, including an IPO. Prior to joining Finch, Mr. Perry held various senior financial leadership roles at several biotech companies including Novelion Therapeutics, Eleven Biotherapeutics, ImmunoGen, Domantis, and Transkaryotic Therapies. Mr. Perry transitioned to the biotech industry after beginning his career at General Electric, where he served in increasingly senior financial roles over fourteen years. Additionally, Mr. Perry currently serves on the Board of Directors of Merus Therapeutics and Kala Pharmaceuticals. He earned a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Amherst College.
“We are thrilled to welcome Ulrich and Greg to the Finch team,” said Mark Smith, Ph.D., CEO of Finch. “Their experience and leadership will be critical as we continue to advance this exciting new field of medicine.”
“It is a pleasure to join Finch, a truly patient-driven organization with a unique ability to leverage insights from clinical research to develop novel microbial therapies for a wide range of diseases and disorders linked to the gut microbiome,” said Dr. Thienel. “With a unique discovery approach, strong leadership, and a robust pipeline, including a Phase 2 Clostridium difficile program, Finch is well-positioned to deliver on its mission to serve patients fighting serious diseases.”
Mr. Perry added, “The Finch team has made tremendous progress with its partners, pipeline and platform in a short period of time. I’m excited to be joining at a critical inflection point for the Company as it is poised to have an outsized impact for all of its stakeholders in the years ahead.”
About Finch Therapeutics Group, Inc.
Finch Therapeutics Group, Inc. (Finch) is developing novel microbial therapies to serve patients with serious unmet medical needs. Built on 30 years of translational research at OpenBiome, MIT, University of Minnesota and the Center for Digestive Diseases, Finch uses Human-First Discovery™ to develop therapies from microbes that have demonstrated clinically significant impacts on patient outcomes. Finch is unique in having both a donor-derived Full-Spectrum Microbiota™ (FSM™) product platform and a Rationally Selected Microbiota™ (RSM™) product platform based on microbes grown in pure culture. Finch’s FSM™ platform is protected by more than 30 issued patents with the earliest priority dates in the industry and deep operational experience, including the largest stool donation program in the world, from which Finch manufactures approximately 1,000 microbial treatments every month. Finch’s lead program, CP101, is an investigational FSM™ product for recurrent C. difficile infections. Finch’s RSM™ platform employs machine-learning algorithms to mine Finch’s unique clinical datasets, reverse engineering successful clinical experience with FSM™ to identify the key microbes driving patient outcomes. Finch has a strategic partnership with Takeda to develop FIN-524, an investigational RSM™ product for inflammatory bowel disease. Finch is using a rich foundation of clinical data to advance its growing pipeline of FSM™ and RSM™ products, leveraging proof-of-principle results to evaluate target indications and inform the design of this new therapeutic class.
