Friday, December 5, 2008

Ex-ImClone CEO Lynch takes executive chairman role at Avila

By Marc Songini

The former head of giant ImClone Systems Inc. has taken the role of executive chairman at local biotech startup Avila Therapeutics Inc., where he plans to do big things.

The Waltham-based Avila this week divulged that Daniel Lynch, the former CEO of ImClone, has quietly been at his new full-time slot for over a month, overseeing corporate strategy and product development plans. Lynch will also raise investment money and negotiate partnerships.

Avila has no CEO, but rather a leadership team where Lynch will play “an active role,” bringing his combination of “experience and maturity to guide our decision making,” said Nagesh Mahanthappa, Avila’s vice president of corporate development and operations. Lynch’s expertise will be particularly useful when crafting partner agreements, said Mahanthappa.

Avila, founded last year, is developing a class of covalent, small-molecule, orally administered drugs that bond to disease-generating proteins, essentially shutting them down, or “silencing” them. In the next few months, the company will sponsor two lead programs to treat Hepatitis C and blood cancer, and will file an investigational new drug application by the end of 2009.

Lynch spent 15 years at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. in executive roles. In 2003, while at New York-based ImClone, he rose from CFO to CEO. The company was dealing with the fallout from a former CEO’s high-profile insider trading (the scandal led to media star Martha Stewart’s imprisonment for lying to investigators). Lynch oversaw the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s approval of ImClone’s cancer drug, Erbitux, which the agency once had rejected. “The day the FDA approved the drug was the highlight of my career,” said Lynch. “It turned the company around.”

After Lynch left ImClone in November 2005, he became director of two smaller venture capital-backed firms including Quincy-based Ivrea Pharmaceuticals Inc., which offers skin treatment drugs.
He is also director of Cambridge-based biotech firm Stromedix Inc. He likes working at non-public companies of this size, because “it’s easier to focus on moving the company forward,” he said.

Ivrea, Stromedix and Avila are all financed, at least in part, by Atlas Venture,  a Waltham-based venture capital firm.

Investors are now pickier where they invest their money, admitted Lynch. Nevertheless, the former CFO said: “I’ve been involved in money-raising initiatives, which is important to companies at this stage of development.”