The San Diego-based Ambrx will be forging ahead without a captain at the helm--at least for a short time. A spokesperson for the seven-year-old biotech--a promising 2005 Fierce 15 company--tells Xconomy that CEO Steve Kaldor "is taking some time off as he considers other options." She added that Kaldor and the board had decided it was time to find a new chief executive.
As biotech scribe Luke Timmerman notes, Ambrx is one of the richest developers in the San Diego hub. It's raised more than $106 million in venture backing since 2003. And Kaldor has helped forge a string of partnerships with Big Pharma companies since he arrived on the scene in 2007.
Kaldor was harboring high hopes for the biotech when FierceBiotech caught up with him at the J.P. Morgan event in San Francisco last January. Noting that Ambrx was in a good position to go public if the market allowed, the intense, Harvard-educated Kaldor described running the company through a period of fast growth. Ambrx has 10 different therapies in the pipeline and evidently has enough money in the bank to fund operations for several years.
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