Xaira Therapeutics Expands Leadership Team to Advance AI-Driven Drug Discovery Pipeline

Xaira Therapeutics (搜索)搜索该词条, the South San Francisco-based AI life sciences company, has strengthened its executive leadership team with the appointment of Ian McCaffery, Ph.D., as Senior Vice President of Translational Science and Early Clinical Development, alongside the promotions of Ci Chu, Ph.D., to Chief Discovery Officer and Bo Wang, Ph.D., to Chief AI Scientist. All three executives will report to CEO Marc Tessier-Lavigne and join Xaira's executive leadership team as the company advances its AI-driven drug discovery and development platform toward the clinic.

The leadership changes signal Xaira's transition from platform-building to clinical execution, with McCaffery tasked with overseeing the company's precision medicine strategy, translational science efforts, and early clinical development programs.

Ian McCaffery Brings Precision Medicine Expertise from AbbVie (搜索)搜索该公司

McCaffery joins Xaira from AbbVie (搜索)搜索该公司, where he served as Vice President and Global Head of Precision Medicine and Companion Diagnostics. Over his 25-year career, he built and led a large organization comprising scientists, clinicians, and engineers, with work spanning translational research and experimental medicine across oncology, immunology, and neuroscience therapeutic areas.

His experience incorporates clinical data, real-world evidence, and artificial intelligence to support drug development, target identification, and regulatory submissions, including investigational new drug applications, biologics license applications, new drug applications, and companion diagnostic approvals linked to precision medicine targeted therapies.

"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.

At Xaira, McCaffery will lead precision medicine efforts and clinical development strategy, overseeing the progression of AI-generated therapeutic medicines. He will partner cross-functionally with Chu and Wang on developing AI models for causal understanding of disease heterogeneity and patient responses.

"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."

Internal Promotions Recognize Platform-Building Contributions

Chu, previously Senior Vice President of AI-Enabled Discovery, has led Xaira's high-throughput biology organization, generating large-scale experimental datasets used to train the company's virtual cell models and support therapeutic design. Before joining Xaira, she led high-content phenotyping and functional genomics teams at insitro (搜索)搜索该词条, bringing more than a decade of experience at the intersection of high-throughput biology and AI/ML.

"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.

Wang, formerly SVP and Head of Biomedical AI, will continue leading the company's biomedical AI strategy as Chief AI Scientist. A former associate professor at the University of Toronto, his research has focused on foundation models for healthcare and biology, including AI-driven frameworks for genomic analysis, precision medicine, and biomolecular modeling. He pioneered development of scGPT, described as the first single-cell foundation model, and BioReason, the first biological reasoning model.

"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."

X-Cell: A Foundation for AI-Guided Therapeutic Discovery

Together, Chu and Wang have helped develop X-Cell, Xaira's first publicly disclosed virtual cell model, along with the X-Atlas/Pisces dataset that underpins it. X-Cell was trained using what the company describes as the largest publicly released genome-wide CRISPRi Perturb-seq dataset, consisting of 25.6 million perturbed single-cell transcriptomes across seven biologically distinct 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. The model is designed to predict cellular responses to genetic perturbations and support AI-guided therapeutic discovery.

Tessier-Lavigne noted that Chu and Wang "have been instrumental in cofounding, building and leading our efforts in high throughput biology and BioAI modeling," adding that their new roles "reflect both what they have built and the trust we are placing in them as we enter our next chapter."

Xaira Therapeutics (搜索)搜索该词条, headquartered in South San Francisco with innovation centers in Seattle and London, seeks to reengineer the drug discovery and development process end-to-end by integrating machine learning research, massive data generation at scale, and integrated drug discovery and development capabilities. The company has leveraged its AI platforms to design and develop a pipeline of novel medicines that are advancing toward the clinic.