CAMBRIDGE, Mass.– ImmuneID, Inc., a precision immunology company employing a proprietary platform to identify and therapeutically target antibody interactions that drive immune diseases, today announced the appointment of James S. Scibetta as Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors. Mr. Scibetta succeeds David Donabedian, Ph.D., Venture Partner of Longwood Fund, who had been serving as CEO and will serve in an advisory capacity to the Company.
“Jim brings to ImmuneID a proven track record of developing advanced and promising science into therapeutic products that improve patient lives,” said Longwood Fund’s Christoph Westphal, M.D., Ph.D., ImmuneID co-founder and Board Chair. “He has demonstrated leadership in corporate strategy and capital formation, along with the establishment of collaborative, high-functioning teams across R&D, bioinformatics, CMC, and commercialization. Jim will be extremely valuable to ImmuneID as it continues to leverage its platform for applications related to diseases that implicate the human immune system, a disease area that is extraordinarily scientifically complex and for which there remains a significant unmet medical need.”
“On behalf of the entire board, I would like to thank David for his significant contributions to ImmuneID,” continued Dr. Westphal. “Under David’s leadership, the Company has raised over $70 million since its Q4 2020 launch, built out the scientific team, and secured state of the art lab space. I look forward to working further with David on the next Longwood portfolio company.”
“The human immune system is highly complex and is involved in a large percentage of human diseases,” Mr. Scibetta said. “The ImmuneID platform, developed in the lab of Lasker Award winner and Harvard professor Dr. Steve Elledge, has the ability to generate an unprecedented quantity of biologically relevant human immune response data. These proprietary capabilities, coupled with the emergence of big data analytics driven by AI and machine learning, have positioned ImmuneID to generate the next generation of precision immunology therapeutics for patients with autoimmune, allergy, cancer and infectious diseases.”
Mr. Scibetta joins ImmuneID after serving as CEO and a member of the Board of Directors of Maverick Therapeutics Inc., a biotechnology company pioneering conditionally active bispecific T-cell targeted immunotherapies that was acquired by Takeda in April 2021. In this role, he led Maverick in the development of the COBRA Platform, which co-opts proteolytic activity in the tumor microenvironment to generate localized t-cell activation and cell killing. Prior to Maverick, he held various executive leadership roles at Pacira Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: PCRX), including President, and previously CFO, overseeing global R&D, CMC, and capacity expansion activities for the development of their drug EXPAREL. He successfully led the company’s 2011 IPO and subsequent debt and equity financings. Previously, Mr. Scibetta served as CFO of Bioenvision Inc. (NASD: BVIN, acquired by Genzyme) and Merrimack Pharmaceuticals. Mr. Scibetta began his career in investment banking, spending over a decade sourcing and executing transactions for a range of public and private healthcare and life sciences companies. He received a B.S. in physics from Wake Forest University and an MBA from the University of Michigan.
