AVROBIO, Inc. announced the appointment of Kim Raineri, as chief manufacturing and technology officer. He brings deep global experience in the cell and gene therapy industry, with a distinguished track record of innovation and implementation of Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP). AVROBIO’s founding chief manufacturing and technology officer, Kim Warren, Ph.D., will be retiring at the end of July. Among many other accomplishments, she led the development of plato®, the company’s proprietary gene therapy platform designed to bring gene therapy to patients worldwide through an efficient, automated, closed manufacturing system developed to be rapidly deployed to contracted manufacturing sites. Raineri has broad, global experience in GMP operations, including in the cell and gene therapy, biologics and medical device spaces. Prior to joining AVROBIO, he served as the vice president of operations for Nikon CeLL innovation Co., Ltd, a Japanese contract development and manufacturing organization. During his tenure, he established the company as the preferred provider of custom process development and manufacturing services for cell and gene therapy products in the Japanese market. Previously, Raineri held management positions at Lonza, serving as the business director for the cell therapy contract manufacturing operations in Singapore for five years, and prior to that as director of operations at Lonza’s Maryland facilities. Raineri was also previously the senior manager of the Tissue Processing Lab at CryoLife Inc.
AVROBIO, Inc. is a gene therapy company. The Company is focused on developing potentially curative hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) gene therapies to treat patients with rare diseases following a single dose treatment regimen. The gene therapies that the Company is engaged in developing employ HSCs that are harvested from the patient and then modified with a lentiviral vector to insert the equivalent of a functional copy of the gene that is mutated in the target disease. The Company's development focus has been on a group of rare genetic diseases referred to as lysosomal disorders, primarily managed with enzyme replacement therapies (ERTs). Its pipeline is comprised of three HSC gene therapy programs, which include AVR-RD-02 for the treatment of Gaucher disease type 1 and type 3; AVR-RD-03 for the treatment of Pompe disease, and AVR-RD-01 for the treatment of Fabry disease.