CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AVROBIO, Inc. (Nasdaq: AVRO), a leading clinical-stage gene therapy company with a mission to free people from a lifetime of genetic disease, today announced the appointment of Kim Raineri, as chief manufacturing and technology officer. He brings deep global experience in the cell and gene therapy industry, with a distinguished track record of innovation and implementation of Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP).
AVROBIO’s founding chief manufacturing and technology officer, Kim Warren, Ph.D., will be retiring at the end of July. Among many other accomplishments, she led the development of plato®, the company’s proprietary gene therapy platform designed to bring gene therapy to patients worldwide through an efficient, automated, closed manufacturing system developed to be rapidly deployed to contracted manufacturing sites.
“We have made it a priority to build leadership in gene therapy manufacturing by integrating and optimizing pioneering technologies as part of our plato platform. As we continue to implement our global clinical trials and prepare for eventual commercial scale, we are delighted to bring Kim Raineri on board. His expertise in global GMP for cell and gene therapy will be highly valuable in keeping AVROBIO at the forefront of this industry,” said Geoff MacKay, AVROBIO’s president and CEO. “I also would like to thank Kim Warren for her integral contributions to AVROBIO these past five years. As one of my co-founders, Kim has played a key role in building the company and establishing plato as an unrivaled lentiviral gene therapy platform.”
“I am thrilled to join AVROBIO, a leader in lentiviral gene therapy and a true pioneer in driving manufacturing advances that address the gene therapy field’s need for faster, more scalable and more automated production,” said Raineri. “The AVROBIO team has created a state-of-the-art gene therapy platform and is clearly committed to continuous innovation on behalf of the patient communities they strive to serve. I am excited to contribute to that work.”
Raineri has broad, global experience in GMP operations, including in the cell and gene therapy, biologics and medical device spaces. Prior to joining AVROBIO, he served as the vice president of operations for Nikon CeLL innovation Co., Ltd, a Japanese contract development and manufacturing organization. During his tenure, he established the company as the preferred provider of custom process development and manufacturing services for cell and gene therapy products in the Japanese market. Previously, Raineri held management positions at Lonza, serving as the business director for the cell therapy contract manufacturing operations in Singapore for five years, and prior to that as director of operations at Lonza’s Maryland facilities. Raineri was also previously the senior manager of the Tissue Processing Lab at CryoLife Inc. He holds a B.S. from the University of Miami and an MBA from Kennesaw State University.
About AVROBIO
Our vision is to bring personalized gene therapy to the world. We aim to halt or reverse disease throughout the body by driving durable expression of functional protein, even in hard-to-reach tissues and organs including the brain, muscle and bone. Our clinical-stage programs include Fabry disease, Gaucher disease and cystinosis and we also are advancing a preclinical program in Pompe disease. AVROBIO is powered by the plato® gene therapy platform, our foundation designed to scale gene therapy worldwide. We are headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., with an office in Toronto, Ontario. For additional information, visit avrobio.com, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
