Athenex, Inc. announced the appointment of Darrel P. Cohen, MD, PhD as Chief Medical Officer of Cell Therapy to lead its clinical development, clinical operations, and regulatory affairs functions. He will be replacing Kurt Gunter, MD, who has decided to pursue other opportunities outside of cell therapy. Dr. Cohen is a hematologist/oncologist with over 25 years of oncology clinical research and drug development experience in both solid tumors and hematological malignancies.

He has held leadership positions of increasing responsibility at Pharmacia, Sanofi-Aventis, and Pfizer, including Vice President of Late-Phase Clinical Development at Pfizer Oncology where he was involved in multiple successful regulatory submissions of new molecularly targeted cancer drugs such as SUTENT® (sunitinib), XALKORI® (crizotinib), and IBRANCE® (palbociclib). More recently, Dr. Cohen was Head of Clinical Development at EUSA Pharma then Chief Medical Officer at Biosight Pharmaceuticals, having been a principal investigator on several clinical trials in the past and co-authored numerous peer-reviewed publications. Darrel received his MD and PhD degrees in Medicine and Microbiology from Boston University School of Medicine, trained as a resident in Internal Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center, and completed a fellowship in Hematology/Oncology at Duke University Medical Center.