- Xaira is an integrated biotechnology company built to deliver on the promise of AI to help transform the drug discovery and development process
- Physician-scientist Dr. Paulo Fontoura joins from Roche, where he served as SVP neuroscience, immunology, ophthalmology, infectious and rare diseases
- Co-founder Dr. Hetu Kamisetty has played a pivotal role in scaling the firm as SVP since its founding
- Company moves into new headquarters at the Gateway of Pacific building in South San Francisco
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Xaira Therapeutics today announced the appointment of Dr. Paulo Fontoura and Dr. Hetu Kamisetty to its C-suite. Fontoura will serve as chief medical officer effective early 2025, and Kamisetty will serve as chief technology officer effective immediately. Both will report to Xaira CEO Marc Tessier-Lavigne. These two additions further build out the C-suite for Xaira, which includes the recent appointments of Dr. Debbie Law as chief scientific officer and Julia Tran as chief people officer.
Additionally, the company will be moving its headquarters to the Gateway of Pacific III campus, a BioMed Realty building, in South San Francisco. Its new facilities in the Bay Area’s biotech hub will support Xaira’s continued growth, which has enabled Xaira to double down on its mission to help re-engineer the way we discover and develop medicines through the end-to-end application of emerging AI technologies.
“The appointments of Paulo and Hetu mark an important new chapter for Xaira as we grow our leadership team and deepen our expertise across key scientific and technical areas,” said Marc Tessier-Lavigne, CEO of Xaira. “Their experience and insight will be invaluable as we continue to advance our mission of leveraging AI to transform drug discovery.”
Fontoura spent the past 16 years at Roche focused on translational medicine and clinical development for several therapeutic areas. From 2020 through mid-2024, he was the global head and senior vice president overseeing neuroscience, immunology, ophthalmology, infectious and rare diseases, and helped create a new focus area for cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.
During his career at Roche, he worked on over 40 new molecular entities, including multiple therapeutic modalities and stages of development, leading to the approval and launch of several breakthrough medicines. These include the only Multiple Sclerosis drug approved for relapsing and primary progressive forms of the disease, the first and only orally administered splicing modifier for all forms of Spinal Muscular Atrophy, the first IL-6R antibody approved for Neuromyelitis Optica Spectrum Disorder patients, the first gene therapy for Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), the first bispecific antibody approved for people living with neovascular Age-related Macular Degeneration and Diabetic Macular Edema and the first drug-device combination in ophthalmology. He was also a part of pioneering new approaches to clinical development, like mobile digital health outcomes enabled by the FLOODLIGHT smartphone app, and the first virtual reality-enabled digital therapy for Autism Spectrum Disorders together with Samsung. His team also spearheaded the first regulatory validated digital endpoint in neuromuscular disorders (SV95 for DMD).
Fontoura received his MD and PhD in Neuroimmunology from the New University of Lisbon, where he trained as a clinical neurologist, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University School of Medicine. He focused on the discovery of new autoantigens and the development of therapeutic DNA vaccines for Multiple Sclerosis. Over the years, he held multiple academic appointments in Portugal and Switzerland, and is currently adjunct professor at the NOVA Medical School in Lisbon. In 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, recognizing special achievement in the neurosciences, the clinical practice of neurology, or academic or administrative neurology.
“Throughout my career, I’ve been committed to advancing novel therapies across some of the most challenging therapeutic areas, from neuroscience and immunology to rare diseases,” said Dr. Paulo Fontoura, Xaira’s Chief Medical Officer. “The opportunity to bring this expertise to Xaira—where innovation, patient outcomes, and AI-enabled approaches to drug discovery and development are so deeply interwoven—was a compelling next step for me. I look forward to working with the team to leverage AI to accelerate the development of new therapies that will change the way we treat patients.”
Kamisetty is a co-founder of Xaira and, as senior vice president, has played a pivotal role in scaling the firm since its inception in 2023. Kamisetty has nearly two decades of experience in AI and ML. Prior to Xaira, he spent a decade at Meta where he played a leading role in several AI related initiatives including some of Meta’s early efforts in Generative AI. Prior to that he was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. David Baker at the University of Washington where he pioneered the development and use of self-supervised generative models of protein families in protein folding and design.
Kamisetty graduated with a PhD in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University, where his doctoral thesis focused on Probabilistic Models of Proteins, and a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Madras. At Xaira, Kamisetty and his team are focused on developing state of the art AI models for drug discovery and using them to address unmet clinical needs.
“The use of generative AI to generate chemical matter with desired properties will be transformative for drug discovery,” said Kamisetty. “Xaira’s founding thesis of combining this with improved understanding of biology and patients to address unmet clinical need is hugely ambitious but fully achievable, and I’m excited to partner with my colleagues to get us there.”
These milestones underscore a landmark year for Xaira. In October 2024, Dr. David Baker, Xaira co-founder, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Drs. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind for pioneering AI-driven advancements in protein structure prediction and novel protein design. The Xaira team is working to advance these models while developing new methods that can connect the world of biological targets and engineered molecules to the human experience of disease.
About Xaira Therapeutics
Xaira Therapeutics is an integrated biotechnology company driving advances in artificial intelligence to learn the language of life and transform how we treat disease. The company seeks to rethink the drug discovery and development process from end-to-end by bringing together leading talent across three core areas: machine learning research to better understand biology, expansive data generation to power new models, and robust therapeutic product development to treat disease. Xaira is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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