Locana Names Casebia Therapeutics’s Jim Burns as New CEO

Locana said Tuesday that it has appointed Jim Burns, most recently CEO of Casebia Therapeutics, as its new chief executive. Burns ran Casebia, a joint venture between CRISPR Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CRSP]]) and Bayer, for three years. Previously he spent three decades at Sanofi Genzyme.

He succeeds Jeffrey Ostrove, who was named to the top role at Locana in May when the company raised $55 million to advance a portfolio of RNA-targeting gene therapies. The San Diego-based biotech described Burns’s appointment as “part of a planned transition.”

Author: Sarah de Crescenzo

Sarah is Xconomy's San Diego-based editor. Prior to joining the team in 2018, she wrote about startups, tech and finance at the San Diego Business Journal. Her decade of full-time news experience includes coverage of subjects including campaign finance, crime and courts as a reporter and editor at outlets throughout California, including the Orange County Register. She earned a bachelor's degree in English Literature at UC San Diego, where she wrote for the student newspaper and played collegiate lacrosse. In 2019, she earned an MBA at UC Irvine.