Coulter Partners places new Chief Scientific and Chief People Officers at Totus Medicines, supporting the company’s senior leadership expansion
Coulter Partners, the global experts in Executive Search and Leadership Development in Life Sciences, Health, and Tech, has recently partnered with Totus Medicines, the drug discovery company using breakthrough chemical biology to make the entire human genome druggable, and was pleased to secure the appointment of Dr. Wei Chen and Daisy Chhokar as the company’s first Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) and Chief People Officer (CPO), respectively.
“The next few years will be pivotal for Totus Medicines as we progress our mission of creating treatments for the world’s most intractable diseases”, Neil Dhawan, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Totus Medicines commented. He added: “We are thrilled to welcome Daisy and Wei to the team and know their counsel will be invaluable as we continue to grow and scale our team, the company, and our drug discovery platform in 2022 and beyond. We are thankful to Coulter Partners for their outstanding support and professionalism in securing these appointments.”
Daisy Chhokar brings nearly 20 years of human resources experience to Totus, where she will be responsible for leading the company’s people and culture strategy as Chief People Officer. Prior to Totus, she served as the Vice President and Head of Human Resources at Nurix Therapeutics, and Director of Human Resources at InterMune, another highly successful biotechnology organization.
“Totus Medicines is on a path of rapid growth as we continue to scale our drug discovery platform. Assembling the right team, including the world’s leading data 2 scientists, biologists, chemists, and more, will be critical to our successful expansion,” Chhokar said. “I am looking forward to working with Neil and the Totus team to make this vision of treating the untreatable a reality.”
Dr. Chen will help Totus Medicines advance its first drug program – TOS-358, a revolutionary breakthrough in cancer treatment – to the clinic in 2022. He brings to Totus over 20 years of medicinal chemistry and drug discovery experience. In Dr. Chen’s new position, he will be tasked with utilizing his expertise to further develop Totus’ vision, managing the company’s strategic initiatives and planning, and optimizing partnerships and investments to ensure the Totus mission of treating all disease is accomplished. Before coming to Totus, Dr. Chen served as a senior leader at both Pharmacyclics/Abbvie and CuraSen Therapeutics, where he successfully built high-performance drug discovery teams and led the efforts resulting in first-in-human clinical trials.
“I have tremendous respect for Neil and the mission of Totus Medicines,” said Dr. Chen. “To be able to utilize Totus’ peerless platform to develop drug candidates that can treat our world’s most threatening diseases is a very exciting prospect, and I look forward to helping lead Totus toward our first round of clinical trials.”
