For the past five years, Charles Kunsch has been a senior director at AbbVie Ventures, US-headquartered biopharmaceutical company AbbVie’s corporate venturing arm.
The unit makes investments in early-stage biotech startups that develop transformational drug discovery technologies and therapeutics in the fields of oncology, autoimmune disease and neurodegenerative disease. Kunsch is based in AbbVie’s R&D centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or, as he put it, “the epicentre of biotech and pharmaceutical R&D”.
Scott Brun, vice-president of AbbVie’s corporate strategy office and scientific affairs and head of AbbVie Ventures said in his nomination of Kunsch: “Chuck’s background as an R&D leader in early-stage biotechnology companies supports his ability to identify and critically evaluate emerging technologies that hold the potential to truly transform care in the disease state areas of greatest interest to AbbVie.”
For Kunsch and his team, success is achieved only when the unit’s portfolio companies have brought new medicines to patients. Since the unit relaunched three years ago, it has been growing its portfolio actively by investing in five to seven new companies annually.
The unit’s investments and active engagement with two US-based biotechnology developers, Alector and Morphic Therapeutic, resulted in strategic partnerships and AbbVie’s discovery and development of new drugs for neurodegenerative disease and fibrosis respectively.
Prior to joining AbbVie Ventures, Kunsch was involved in discovery research at two startup biotech companies – Human Genome Sciences and AtheroGenics – that eventually went public.
