Alnylam has named Barry Greene as its new COO, making him the latest in a series of executives to leave Millennium Pharmaceuticals and join the RNAi startup.
Greene was most recently general manager of oncology at Millennium. He joined the com- pany in early 2001 at a time when “the company was moving from a platform company to a product-based company,” providing him with “a fabulous opportunity to build a very strong oncology … division.” But as Millennium has gone through a series of changes recently, including significant layoffs, “I was evaluating what I wanted to do next.”
With his connections to Alnylam president and CEO John Maraganore — former senior vice president of strategic product development at Millennium — Greene said he was presented with the opportunity to come on board as COO, which was “too extraordinary … to not come and try to do.” Alnylam’s executive team also includes senior vice president of business development Vincent Miles, who previously held various vice president positions at Millennium.
Now that Greene has settled into the COO position full time, he said that he is focused on working with Alnylam’s management to figure out how to build up the company’s R&D platform, to identify business deals, to assess the company’s financing needs, and to initiate “IND-enabling projects so that in two or three years we have products that are entering clinical trials.”
Before joining Millennium, Greene was executive vice president and chief business officer of Mediconsult.com, and prior to that, vice president of marketing and customer services at AstraZeneca, and a partner at Andersen Consulting in pharmaceutical/biotechnol- ogy marketing and sales practice.
CytoGenix said this week that it has named John Rossi to its board of directors.
Rossi is currently the director of the department of molecular biology and dean of the graduate School of Biological Sciences of the Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope Cancer Center, and was also named chairman of Benitec’s scientific advisory board in September. Rossi holds a PhD from Brown University Medical School.
Rossi is currently working on, among other things, developing anti-HIV RNA-based therapeutics; examining the use of siRNAs as agents against HIV in hematopoietic stem-cell gene therapy; improving the expression of anti-HIV RNAs with enhanced ribozyme and aptamer expression systems; developing treatments for Type I diabetes using catalytic RNAs or ribozymes; and establishing methods of efficient gene transfer to blood and vascular cells.