Susan Keefe lands Quotient Therapeutics CFO role permanently
Somatic genomics is the study of non-inherited, acquired genetic mutations and molecular changes (DNA, epimutations, copy number changes) that accumulate in body cells (somatic cells) over a lifetime. These changes are critical in driving disease, particularly in cancer development, ageing, and neurodegenerative disorders, rather than being passed to offspring.
Keefe, who has spent 30 years in finance, accounting and operations in the life sciences, most recently served as acting CFO through her role at the company’s founder, Flagship Pioneering. She is based at Quotient’s Cambridge, MA office.
CEO Rahul Kakkar said Keefe “brings a powerful combination of strategic insight, operational rigour and experience building and scaling public and private life science organisations.”
Keefe added: “Somatic genomics has the potential to uncover novel biological insights that inform breakthrough therapies across a broad range of diseases. I look forward to joining the Quotient team and building a solid financial and operational foundation to support the company’s long-term growth and value creation strategy.”
Prior to Flagship, Keefe was Interim CFO of Benson Hill. Previously, she was CFO of GreenLight Biosciences, where she steered financial strategies for a pioneering company developing RNA-based solutions with applications in both agriculture and human health.
Before that, she held leadership roles in finance and administration at Danforth Advisors and Aushon Biosystems and earlier in her career developed core financial acumen through roles at SeraCare Life Sciences, Procter & Gamble, and PwC.
As previously reported in Business Weekly, Quotient roared out of stealth on both sides of the Atlantic on the wings of intellectual input from Wellcome Sanger Institute – allied to cash and brainpower from US partners Flagship Pioneering and the University of Texas Southwestern.
Quotient, co-steered by former Sanger Institute director Sir Mike Stratton who serves on the board, is geared to become the fountainhead of new first-in-class drugs across a broad range of modalities and therapeutic areas, including immune disease, cardiometabolic disease, infectious disease, oncology, neurodegenerative disease, rare disease and ageing.
Three of Quotient’s academic co-founders are Sanger Institute senior leaders – Professor Stratton, Dr Peter Campbell and Dr Iñigo Martincorena.
Flagship Pioneering in Cambridge, Massachusetts, made an initial commitment of $50 million to advance the development of the company’s platform – following two years of development at Flagship Labs – and to pursue a potentially blockbusting pipeline of new medicines.
Quotient’s platform uses proprietary single molecule, whole-genome sequencing technology to reveal the extensive variation encoded in the somatic genome at unprecedented resolution.
It is underpinned by the Sanger Institute’s research on how tissues accumulate mutations, age and acquire diseases such as cancer. As these diseases may arise from mutations in a single cell, there is a need for ultra-accurate methods, such as the ones developed at the Sanger Institute, for the early detection of extremely small signals.
These methods, in turn, help interpret how mutations subsequently evolve to either cause disease or mitigate it.
As we revealed last November, ProFound Therapeutics and Quotient Therapeutics entered into separate feasibility agreements with GSK to discover and validate novel targets and therapeutic approaches in respiratory and liver diseases.
These were the first company-focused agreements signed under the framework collaboration between Flagship and GSK to combine the latter’s disease area expertise and development capabilities with Flagship’s ecosystem of bioplatform companies, inclusive of its novel modalities and technologies.
