Wave Life Sciences Announces Appointment of Dr. Erik Ingelsson as Chief Scientific Officer

Appointment builds on Wave’s recent progress advancing innovative genetic targets, such as INHBE, and continues to add significant experience to accelerate the rapid identification and translation of unique genetic insights into medicines

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 09, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Wave Life Sciences Ltd. (Nasdaq: WVE), a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on unlocking the broad potential of RNA medicines to transform human health, today announced the appointment of Erik Ingelsson, MD, PhD, as Chief Scientific Officer. Dr. Ingelsson will drive Wave’s emerging therapeutic portfolio strategy, including growing its genetics and genomics capabilities for identifying new, high impact targets, and leveraging the company’s best-in-class multimodal discovery and development platform to advance transformative RNA medicines. Most recently, Dr. Ingelsson served as Senior Vice President, Head of Target Discovery, at GSK.

“Our mission to unlock the broad potential of RNA medicines requires us to combine the capabilities of our best-in-class oligonucleotide platform with novel drug targets informed by human genetics. Dr. Ingelsson brings to Wave deep expertise in genetics and drug discovery, as well as substantial experience in metabolic diseases. He will leverage his experience to accelerate identification of new genetic insights and rapidly translate those insights into RNA medicines at Wave, including with our wholly owned INHBE program for obesity,” said Paul Bolno, MD, MBA, President and Chief Executive Officer of Wave Life Sciences. “I am excited to welcome Dr. Ingelsson to our leadership team and look forward to his contributions, which will shape the future of our sustainable, diverse and impactful therapeutic pipeline across multiple modalities, including RNA editing and siRNA.”

While at GSK, Dr. Ingelsson led a team focused on a large-scale, industrialized approach to target discovery and validation, bringing together functional genomics, chemical biology, structural biology, protein and cellular sciences to drive drug discovery and development. His organization worked across all therapeutic areas at GSK.

Previously, Dr. Ingelsson was the SVP of Genomic Sciences at GSK, an organization with world-leading skills and capabilities in human genetics, computational biology, omics technologies and gene editing, responsible for harnessing the latest methods and technologies in genomics to discover and validate novel drug targets, and to drive more successful development of the next generation of medicines. Before joining GSK, Dr. Ingelsson was Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. His lab used human genetics and functional genomics to discover novel biology and drug targets related to insulin resistance and related conditions, such as obesity, MASH, and cardiovascular disease. His work combined large-scale human genetics studies with in-depth pre-clinical validation work and an emphasis on cardiometabolic diseases.