Dr. June Almenoff joined the Board in 2021. Dr. Almenoff is an accomplished biopharma executive with close to 25 years of senior leadership experience. She currently serves as a board director and advisor to management of numerous biopharma companies. Dr. Almenoff served as President and Chief Medical Officer of Furiex Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by Actavis plc (now AbbVie) for $1.2B. Furiex developed eluxadoline (Viberzi®), which was approved both in the United States and Europe. She also served as Chief Medical Officer of RedHill Biopharma Ltd (Nasdaq: RDHL). Earlier in her career, Dr. Almenoff was at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) for 12 years, where she held various positions of increasing responsibility. She was a Vice President in the Clinical Safety Organization, chaired a PhRMA-FDA working group, and worked in the area of scientific licensing. Dr. Almenoff also led the development of pioneering systems for minimizing risk in drug development, which have been widely adopted by industry and regulators.
Dr. Almenoff has strong expertise in translational medicine, clinical development, commercial strategy, and business development across numerous therapeutic areas. Dr. Almenoff has led or contributed to numerous regulatory submissions, product approvals and launches. She serves on the investment advisory board of the Harrington Discovery Institute, is a director on the board of Avalo Therapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: AVTX) and is a Director-Advisor of inSoma Bio. She previously served as a member of the board of directors of TiGenix NV (formerly Nasdaq: TIG), which was acquired by Takeda, Brainstorm Cell Therapeutics (Nasdaq: BCLI), and OHR Pharmaceutical (formerly Nasdaq: OHRP).
Dr. Almenoff received her B.A. cum laude from Smith College and graduated with AOA honors from the M.D.-Ph.D. program at the Icahn (Mt. Sinai) School of Medicine. She completed post-graduate medical training at Stanford University Medical Center and served on the faculty of Duke University School of Medicine. She is an adjunct professor at Duke, a Fellow of the American College of Physicians (FACP) and has authored over 70 publications.