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.
