LifeMine Tx appoints CMO and EVP/head of biology

Further adding new talent to its management team, LifeMine Therapeutic, a US start-up searching the fungal biosphere for genetically-encoded small molecules (GEMs), today announced the appointment of Dr Elliot Ehrich as chief medical officer and executive vice president of translational science, and of Lata Jayaraman as executive vice president and head of biology.

“Elliot and Lata are truly distinguished and accomplished drug development professionals. We welcome them with great enthusiasm to crucial leadership positions on the LifeMine expeditionary force,” said Gregory Verdine, co-founder, president and chief executive officer of LifeMine. “Their deep expertise, spanning target selection and preclinical discovery through all phases of clinical investigation and on to FDA approval, will be critical as we continue to source mechanistically and structurally novel small molecule leads and drive them toward the clinic with unparalleled speed, predictability and scalability."

Dr Ehrich most recently served as president of Skyhawk Therapeutics. Before joining Skyhawk as the company’s chief medical officer, Dr Ehrich served as a venture partner at 5AM Ventures and as chief medical officer at Expansion Therapeutics, a 5AM Ventures portfolio company. Dr Ehrich previously spent 17 years at Alkermes, leading the development and successful Food and Drug Administration (FDA) registration of multiple new medicines as chief medical officer and executive vice president of R&D. Prior to Alkermes, Dr Ehrich held positions of increasing responsibility in clinical pharmacology and clinical research at Merck & Co (NYSE: MRK).