Diego Miralles, M.D., has joined Flagship Pioneering as CEO-partner. Flagship disclosed the appointment of Miralles, who will serve as CEO of its portfolio company Laronde, alongside news that it has hired ex-Rubius Therapeutics executive Andrew Oh as senior partner.
Miralles joined Flagship after a three-year spell as CEO of Vividion Therapeutics, in which time he oversaw the raising of a $82 million series B round and the signing of a deal with Roche worth $135 million upfront. Earlier in his career, Miralles served as president of Adaptive Therapeutics and spent a decade rising through the ranks at Johnson & Johnson to the post of global head of innovation.
At Flagship, Miralles will work as CEO-partner. Flagship appointed a series of CEO-partners last year, starting with the hiring of Fabrice Chouraqui, formerly president of Novartis Pharmaceuticals U.S., and culminating with the luring of Tuyen Ong, M.D., from Biogen.
Like the other CEO-partners, Miralles will contribute to the Flagship leadership team and run one of its biotechs. Flagship has put Miralles in charge of Laronde, a stealthy startup “with the mission to become the leader in the development of nucleic acid medicines by leveraging its multi-modality eRNA platform.”
Flagship has said Laronde has “established a powerful technology exploiting the properties of naturally occurring eRNAs allowing the development of therapies with exceptional precision and durability of expression to address unmet needs across multiple disease areas.” Other snippets show the company has looked at therapeutic areas such as genetic disorders, vaccines, immuno-oncology, ophthalmology and pulmonary diseases.
Miralles joins a team that has already made some key hires and is expanding quickly. Tushar Misra and Vadim Dudkin came on board as, respectively, executive vice president for technical development and manufacturing and chief technology officer last year. Flagship’s job page lists 14 open positions.
The appointment of Oh to the role of senior partner at Flagship positions the VC shop to benefit from the experience of an executive it has worked closely with in the past. Oh spent three years as chief financial officer of Flagship’s Rubius before leaving to take up a post at the VC firm late last year.