Pleno, a clinical and multi-omics diagnostics company revolutionizing biological target detection, announced the appointment of Dr. Vik Vaz, M.D., as its new chief executive officer and to serve on its Board of Directors, effective immediately.Dr. Vaz will lead Pleno’s next growth phase as the company prepares to scale its commercial operations with the help of its new $25 million Series B funding. The key investors, Deerfield Management, Foresite Capital, and Medical Excellence Capital, remain committed to supporting the next phase of the company’s growth strategy.
Dr. Vaz served most recently as head of strategy and market intelligence and a leader of the companion diagnostics business at Illumina. His responsibilities included leading enterprise-wide strategic planning and portfolio investment along with key strategic transactions & partnerships, new market development strategy, and companion diagnostics revenue generation. Previously, Dr. Vaz also worked as a partner at the Boston Consulting Group and at McKinsey and Company, where he worked with top pharmaceutical, medical device, and life sciences industry leaders to drive organic and inorganic growth as well as lead strategic transformations, drive organizational turnarounds and support transactions.
And he remains actively licensed as a physician, having previously trained and served as a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital and the University of Miami.
Pleno is an early-stage San Diego startup company developing the RAPTOR multi-omic instrument platform to transform biological target detection and enable various life science applications. The company makes complex multi-omic known-target detection accessible and affordable to everyone through its Hypercoding technology that simplifies the entire process and enables unprecedented improvements in performance, cost, and scale.
KEY QUOTES:
“I’m excited to welcome Vik to Pleno. He is a proven business leader with a strong track record. Vik’s deep industry understanding and his ability to translate strategy into exceptional execution, will bring immense value to Pleno as it begins its commercialization journey.”
- Gregory T. Lucier, chairman of the Board of Directors at Pleno
“I am excited to be joining Pleno and look forward to leading this exceptional team. We are poised to bring a transformational new technology to market that will improve patient care and drive advances in biological understanding. The data we have generated already will spur impact across oncology, infectious disease and many other clinical applications.”
- Dr. Vaz
