AstraZeneca has filled its chief medical officer role and announced a collaboration on a cancer immunotherapy treatment with the rival Peregrine Pharmaceuticals.
The British drug group, which has a large research facility in Cheshire, said that it had appointed Sean Bohen executive vice-president of global medicines development and chief medical officer. He joins from the San Francisco-based Genentech and replaces Briggs Morrison, who left to work at a biotech company in the United States.
At AstraZeneca, Dr Bohen will be in charge of helping to drive new drugs through the approval process and ensure patient safety.
Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of AstraZeneca, said that Dr Bohen, who has also previously worked as a clinical instructor in oncology at Stanford University School of Medicine, was a “tremendous scientist and an accomplished drug developer”.
Mr Soriot announced the appointment on the same day that AstraZeneca revealed that it had agreed to collaborate with Peregrine Pharmaceuticals, which is listed in New York, on a cancer immunotherapy clinical trial collaboration.
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The trial aims to “develop therapeutics to stimulate the body’s immune system to fight cancer”. It will evaluate the safety and effectiveness of combining Peregrine’s bavituximab treatment with AstraZeneca’s durvalumab inhibitor, as well as a recommended dose regimen. Peregrine will conduct the initial trial,which also aims to establish the recommended dose.
Robert Iannone, the head of immuno-oncology, global medicines development, at AstraZeneca, said: “We believe that combination therapy in immuno-oncology has the potential to be a novel and highly effective approach to treating cancer.”
It is the latest collaboration for AstraZeneca, which has a biologics global research and development division called MedImmune and has a strong oncology division focused on ovarian, lung, breast and haematological cancers.