CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ImmuneID, Inc., a precision immunology company employing a proprietary platform to identify and therapeutically target antibody interactions that drive immune diseases, today announced that Annalisa D’Andrea, Ph.D., has been appointed President and Chief Scientific Officer. Dr. D’Andrea brings more than 25 years of experience in translational research in immunology to ImmuneID.
“The addition of Annalisa as President and CSO is an important milestone for ImmuneID, as the company applies its platform to identify promising immunological therapeutic targets,” said Stephen Elledge, Ph.D., ImmuneID co-founder and Chair of ImmuneID SAB, Lasker Award winner, and The Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics and Medicine, Harvard Medical School. “Annalisa’s experience advancing drug candidates to the clinic will be extremely valuable and I look forward to working with her.”
“Annalisa brings significant drug development experience that will be extremely valuable as the company works to develop therapeutic candidates to treat patients in a range of disease areas, such as oncology, autoimmune diseases, severe allergies, and infectious diseases,” said Longwood Fund’s Christoph Westphal, M.D., Ph.D., ImmuneID co-founder and Executive Chair.
The announcement of Dr. D’Andrea as President and CSO follows the launch of the company last year with a $22M seed financing led by founding investor Longwood Fund. Participants in the financing included Arch Venture Partners, Pitango HealthTech, Alta Partners, In-Q-Tel, Xfund, and others. ImmuneID plans to use this funding to develop therapeutic programs in areas including severe allergy, autoimmunity, oncology, and infectious disease.
“ImmuneID’s platform enables rapid and accurate scanning of a patient’s immunological history and holds significant promise to generate information that will elucidate disease patterns and patient responses. This information will guide us in the discovery and development of new therapeutics related to immune diseases,” D’Andrea said. “I am thrilled to join ImmuneID at this stage as we build a talented scientific team and lead the company’s scientific growth.”
In addition to her appointment at ImmuneID, Dr. D’Andrea joins the Longwood Fund as a Venture Partner.
Previously, Dr. D’Andrea was Chief Scientific Officer of Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals. Before joining Kiniksa, D’Andrea was Vice President and Global Head of Discovery for Immunology and Inflammation at Roche, where she was responsible for discovering and advancing multiple drug candidates to the clinic. Prior to Roche, she was Executive Director and Section Head of Discovery Biology at SRI International, where she was responsible for developing strategies to advance drugs through discovery and into development. Dr. D’Andrea received a Bachelor of Sciences, summa cum laude, from the University of Siena in Italy and a doctoral degree from the University of Florence while training at the Wistar Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.
About ImmuneID
ImmuneID is a precision immunology company using its proprietary platform to simultaneously identify and therapeutically target millions of antibody interactions that drive immune diseases. Based on technology developed by scientific founders Stephen Elledge (Harvard), Ben Larman (Johns Hopkins), and Tomasz Kula (Harvard), we are employing our massively parallel, multiplexed, and unbiased systems to develop therapeutics for autoimmunity, severe allergy, oncology and infectious disease. ImmuneID was founded in 2020 by Longwood Fund and is headquartered in Cambridge, MA.
