Dr Robert Kim joins Apellis as chief medical officer

Dr Robert Kim has taken up a role at Apellis Pharmaceuticals as chief medical officer, bringing to the US clinical stage immunotherapy company experience from Novartis, Genentech and GSK.

While at Genentech he managed the Lucentis phase III clinical programme through to its first approval in wet age related macular degeneration.

Meanwhile, at he served at GSK as VP of clinical ophthalmology, helping build its early stage clinical pipeline, and was VP and head of pharmaceutical product development at Novartis/Alcon.

Most recently he was at retina startup Vision Medicines, where he was chief medical officer and head of R&D.

In his new role at Louisville, Kentucky-based Apellis Dr Kim will help the company optimise its drug development strategy as its clinical programmes progress toward late-stage clinical testing.

Apellis CEO Cedric Francois said: "Bob is an experienced clinical drug developer whose deep knowledge and experience will help us prepare for our confirmatory trials in geography atrophy and the further expansion of our exciting clinical pipeline centred on the inhibition of complement factor C3."