Ikena Oncology Inc. announced the internal promotion of Michelle Zhang, Ph.D., to Chief Scientific Officer (CSO), effective as of late November 2021. Dr. Zhang, one of Ikena's first employees, has served many roles over her tenure at Ikena, most recently as Senior Vice President of Translational Research and Early Development at Ikena. As CSO, Dr. Zhang is primarily responsible for overseeing and executing Ikena's research strategy, advancing discovery programs through target validation and lead optimization toward development candidate nominations and IND filings. Michelle Zhang, Ph.D., joined Ikena (then Kyn Therapeutics) in 2016 as Vice President, Research and Development and was later promoted to Senior Vice President, Translational Research and Early Development. At Ikena, she has guided critical progress of the company's pipeline programs to clinical studies. Dr. Zhang has over 20 years of oncology drug discovery and development experience in biotech as an entrepreneur in residence at Atlas Venture as well as at Curis, Inc. and BioMed Valley Discoveries, and in pharma at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research. Her R&D expertise spans across small molecule, antibody, antibody-drug-conjugate, protein and radiopharmaceutical therapeutic and diagnostic modalities. She has led numerous programs from early discovery, translational research and non-clinical evaluations into clinical development. Dr. Zhang received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Harvard University.
Ikena Oncology, Inc. is a targeted oncology company. The Company is focused on developing differentiated therapies for patients in need that target nodes of cancer growth, spread, and therapeutic resistance in the Hippo and RAS onco-signaling network. The Company's lead targeted oncology program, IK-930, is a transcriptional enhanced associate domain 1 (TEAD1) selective Hippo pathway inhibitor, a known tumor suppressor pathway that also drives resistance to multiple targeted therapies. The Company's second clinical-stage program targets the RAS signaling pathway with IK-595, a novel MEK-RAF molecular glue. It has IK-175 aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) antagonist program that completed Phase 1 clinical trial. Its partnering portfolio also includes several other immune oncology programs that are available for potential sale or outlicensing, including PY314, a Phase 2 ready TREM2 antagonist, PY159, a Phase 2 ready TREM1 antagonist, and PY265, an IND-ready MARCO antagonist.