— Bob Azelby is leaving his position as president and CEO of Elieum Therapeutics and stepping down from its board. General counsel Jim Bucher and Erin Lavelle, chief operating officer and chief financial officer, are also leaving the 4-year-old neurosciences company.
The changes come amid an announcement Thursday that the company will lay off about 55% of its workforce in the first half of 2023. Board chair Andrew Levin, an Eliem co-founder and RA Capital partner, has been appointed executive chairman. Levin will oversee the operations of the company upon Azelby’s departure, which the company said is imminent.
Eliem raised $80 million when it went public in the summer of 2021, but its shares sank last April after reporting disappointing clinical data on a compound for pain. The company is now pivoting to focus on a preclinical program with a lead compound that has potential to treat epilepsy, pain and depression disorders. The company had $123.6 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities as of Dec. 31.
Azelby was previously president and CEO of Seattle biotech firm Alder BioPharmaceuticals, which was acquired by Lundbeck for $1.95 billion in 2019. He was also chief commercial officer at Juno Therapeutics, which was acquired by Celgene for $9 billion in 2018.
Bucher previously served as general counsel at Alder and Lavelle was its chief operating officer.
Eliem will retain chief scientific officer and head of R&D Valerie Morisset. The company had about 30 full-time employees in April.
— Amazon veteran John Walzer is now vice president of engineering at New York City-based Rokt, and will lead a new Seattle development center for the e-commerce company.
Walzer spent more than ten years at Amazon, most recently as a senior software development manager. He also served as lead software development engineer for on-demand music service Rhapsody International, and had engineering roles at mobile messaging company OpenMarket and VeriSign.
Rokt works with more than 2,500 global brands, including Uber, PayPal and Live Nation. The company is now hiring engineers in Seattle.
— Seattle health tech startup DexCare appointed Jamie Gier as chief marketing officer. Gier previously held executive roles at IDX, which was acquired by GE Healthcare for $1.2 billion, Microsoft’s health solutions group, and SCI Solutions, a patient access company acquired in 2020.
— Upbound, which manages applications across teams and clouds, appointed Oren Teich as chief product officer and Tom Anthony as vice president of sales and customer success.
Teich was previously senior vice president of product management at marketing platform Foursquare, and was a product management director for cloud products at Google. Anthony previously spent eight years at Okta, most recently as vice president of enterprise sales.
— Jeff Tagliabue is now chief financial officer at Discuss, a Seattle-based startup that offers a video-based platform to conduct market research. He was previously chief financial officer at market research company Pollfish. He will work remotely from New Jersey.
