Chief Executive Officer

Client Team Lead: John Spencer
CEO | 20240611

Client: AxoSim

AxoSim, a life science company building human brains in the lab at scale to heal memory, movement, and pain disorders, today announced the appointment of Alif Saleh as chief executive officer. With this appointment, co-founder and previous CEO Lowry Curley, PhD, steps into the role of chief scientific officer. Saleh joins the AxoSim board of directors, and Curley continues to serve as a member.

“I am thrilled Alif chose to join us for our next chapter of growth and scale,” said Curley. “His expertise and strong commercial background will accelerate our leadership in the field. I am excited to increase my focus on AxoSim’s science and technology.”

Saleh is a company builder who has raised half a billion dollars in funding to develop and commercialize novel technologies in the life science and biotechnology industry. In 2022, The Healthcare Technology Report recognized him as one of the “Top 50 Healthcare Technology CEOs.” Saleh was previously CEO of Scipher Medicine Corporation, Senior VP of GC International Corporation, and he held various commercial and product management roles at Alfa Laval Corporation in Asia and Europe. He received his Master of Science in Chemical and Genetic Engineering from Lund Institute of Technology in Sweden.

Saleh said, “Investments into drug development in neurology are skyrocketing but with the highest failure rate in the industry. The time has come to adopt new technologies to increase success rates, and AxoSim is uniquely positioned to facilitate this change. I want to thank the board and employees for entrusting me to lead them through the next area of growth.”

AxoSim’s brain-on-a-chip platform leverages tissue engineering, neural interfacing and AI to test groundbreaking interventions in neurology and generate human-relevant data. The company partners with pharma to accelerate drug development while increasing the success rate of taking drugs from the lab into humans.

AxoSim also recently appointed David Weiner, MD, and Dale Pfost, PhD, as board co-chairs. Weiner has 30 years of drug discovery experience in neurology and was instrumental in the development of Nuplazid at Acadia and Safinamide at EMD/Merck Serono. He was previously chief executive officer at Amathus Therapeutics and chief medical officer at Lumos Pharma, aTyr Pharma and Proteostasis Therapeutics. He serves on the science advisory board of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

Weiner said, “To facilitate change, we need multiple stakeholders to buy in. We are impressed with Alif’s proven ability to drive diverse stakeholders across an entire industry towards a common goal of real change and improving patient care by adopting new technology.”

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