Gritstone Oncology, Inc. Announces the Appointment of Rahsaan W. Thompson as General Counsel and Executive Vice President
April 06, 2020 at 06:30 pm IST
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Gritstone Oncology, Inc. announced the appointment of Rahsaan W. Thompson as its executive vice president and general counsel. Mr. Thompson joins Gritstone with over 20 years of experience as corporate counsel. Prior to Gritstone, Mr. Thompson was the general counsel for Opiant Pharmaceuticals, where he was responsible for all legal aspects of corporate strategy, intellectual property, transactions, compliance and regulatory matters. Previously, as the vice president of law for Actelion Pharmaceuticals, he led the Actelion Law Department based in San Francisco, California. In this position, Mr. Thompson was responsible for overseeing the law department’s support for the Actelion U.S. business. In earlier years at Actelion, he served as associate general counsel and corporate secretary, where he led litigation, government investigations and acquisitions. Before joining Actelion, he worked for the law firm of Quarles & Brady in Chicago, Illinois. Mr. Thompson was the associate general counsel at Abraxis Bioscience, before its acquisition by Celegene. Mr. Thompson also served as Corporate Counsel at McKesson Corporation. He began his career as an assistant district attorney in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office. Mr. Thompson obtained his bachelor’s degree from Southern Methodist University and his law degree from Hofstra University. He has served on various non-profit boards and presently serves on the Board of Directors for the Oakland Museum of California Board of Directors as the finance committee chair.
Gritstone bio, Inc. is a biotechnology company. The Company discovers, develops, manufactures and delivers next generation cancer and infectious disease immunotherapy candidates. It has developed two vectors that it deploys with the aim of eliciting the desired immune response: self-amplifying mRNA (samRNA) and chimpanzee adenovirus (ChAd). Its two oncology programs in clinical-stage development are GRANITE, individualized neoantigen-based immunotherapy, and SLATE, an off-the-shelf shared neoantigen-based immunotherapy. It has an infectious disease pipeline, which includes two programs in clinical-stage development: CORAL, a second-generation COVID-19 vaccine program that may have pan-coronavirus potential to protect against future coronavirus pandemics, and an HIV therapeutic/cure vaccine candidate. In oncology, it develops personalized vaccines that aim to destroy tumors through CD8+ (killer) T cell recognition of tumor cells by virtue of their surface display of neoantigens.