Xaira is an integrated biotechnology company built to deliver on the promise of AI to help transform the drug discovery and development process

Dr. Ian McCaffery joins from AbbVie, where he served as Vice President and Global Head of Precision Medicine and Companion Diagnostics

Dr. Ci Chu has led the company’s high throughput biology function to power data generation for virtual cell models and for therapeutic design and development

Dr. Bo Wang has pioneered the development of X-Cell, Xaira’s first virtual cell model, and directed the integration of AI agents throughout the company’s operations

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Xaira Therapeutics today announced the appointment of Ian McCaffery, Ph.D., as Senior Vice President, Translational Science and Early Clinical Development, and the promotions of Ci Chu, Ph.D., to Chief Discovery Officer, and Bo Wang, Ph.D., to Chief AI Scientist. All three will report to CEO Marc Tessier-Lavigne and join Xaira’s executive leadership team.

McCaffery will lead Xaira’s precision medicine efforts and clinical development strategy. He will also oversee the progression of the company’s AI-generated therapeutic medicines, leveraging AI-driven disease insights to design and execute clinical studies to accelerate the Xaira pipeline. In this, he will partner cross-functionally with Chu and Wang on the development of AI models for causal understanding of disease heterogeneity and patient responses. Chu and Wang’s promotions recognize their contributions to Xaira's AI-enabled drug discovery platform, including the development of X-Cell, the company's first virtual cell model, and the X-Atlas/Pisces dataset that powers it.

“Ian’s 25-year career sits at the interaction of translational science, precision medicine, diagnostics, clinical development and AI-enabled discovery, making him an ideal leader to advance X-Patient, our AI-patient stratification platform, alongside his oversight of clinical development and of our AI-designed therapeutic pipeline,” said Tessier-Lavigne. “Chu and Bo have been instrumental in cofounding, building and leading our efforts in high throughput biology and BioAI modeling. Their new roles reflect both what they have built and the trust we are placing in them as we enter our next chapter.”

McCaffery will join Xaira from AbbVie, where as Vice President and Global Head of Precision Medicine and Companion Diagnostics, he built and led a large organization comprising scientists, clinicians and engineers. His work has spanned translational research and experimental medicine across oncology, immunology and neuroscience therapeutic areas, drawing on clinical and real-world data, cutting-edge technologies, and AI/ML to advance clinical-stage assets and disease strategy and to drive target discovery. He has contributed to regulatory filings across INDs, BLAs and NDAs, and companion diagnostic approvals linked to approvals of precision medicine targeted therapies.

“We stand at a historic inflection point where computational power and biological insights from patients and from highly curated models have converged to transform how medicines are discovered and developed,” said McCaffery. “There is no company better positioned to capitalize on this moment than Xaira, and I am excited to help drive that mission forward.”

Chu joined Xaira as VP of Early Discovery before becoming SVP of AI-Enabled Discovery, bringing more than a decade of experience at the intersection of high-throughput biology and AI/ML, including leading high-content phenotyping and functional genomics teams at insitro.

Wang joined Xaira as SVP and Head of Biomedical AI. Previously as an associate professor at the University of Toronto, he pursued a career focused on foundation models for healthcare and biology, including AI-driven frameworks for genomic analysis, precision medicine, and biomolecular modeling. He pioneered development of the first single cell foundation model, scGPT, and the first biological reasoning model, BioReason.

“The potential of AI in drug discovery is currently limited by the data available in biology. At Xaira, I am excited about pushing the limits of data quality and scale and closing the loop between our wet lab and dry modeling capabilities to rapidly iterate toward transformative therapies,” said Chu.

“AI only matters here if it makes science better. That’s the bar we’ve set at Xaira, and it’s why this work is so important,” said Wang. “X-Cell is proof that we can clear that bar, and I’m excited to keep raising it.”

These appointments follow Xaira’s previous launch of X-Cell, its first publicly disclosed virtual cell model, trained on X-Atlas/Pisces, the largest genome-wide CRISPRi Perturb-seq dataset ever released, comprising 25.6 million perturbed single-cell transcriptomes across seven biologically diverse cellular contexts. At 4.9 billion parameters, X-Cell is the largest causal perturbation model released to date and the first shown to follow the power-law scaling dynamics observed in large language models.

About Xaira Therapeutics

Xaira Therapeutics is an AI life sciences company creating frontier machine learning models to discern the language of life and deliver transformative medicines to patients. Xaira seeks to reengineer the drug discovery and development process from end-to-end by bringing together leading talent across three core areas: machine learning research to produce powerful, predictive models of disease, therapeutic design, and patient care; massive data generation at scale to train that artificial intelligence; and integrated drug discovery and development to create new medicines. Xaira has leveraged its AI platforms to design and develop a pipeline of novel medicines that are advancing towards the clinic. Xaira is headquartered in South San Francisco with innovation centers in Seattle and London.

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Source: Xaira Therapeutics