Chinook Therapeutics Announces News COO and CSO

Chinook Therapeutics announces Tom Frohlich as the chief operating officer and Andrew King as the chief scientific officer.

FREMONT, CA: Chinook Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical firm dedicated to the discovery, development, and commercialization of precision medicines for kidney diseases, has announced that Tom Frohlich, chief business officer, has been raised to the position of chief operating officer (COO), and Andrew King, D.V.M, Ph.D., head of renal discovery and translational medicine, has been introduced as the chief scientific officer (CSO) of Chinook.

“We are thrilled to announce these extremely well-deserved promotions for both Tom and Andrew to recognize the important roles they are playing in building Chinook into a leading kidney disease company,” said Eric Dobmeier, president and chief executive officer of Chinook Therapeutics. “Tom is a seasoned commercial and business development executive who co-founded Chinook, led business negotiations with AbbVie for our license to atrasentan and our merger with Aduro, and has assumed broad operational responsibilities at the company. Andrew is a highly-respected expert in kidney disease biology who was instrumental in bringing both atrasentan and BION-1301 into our pipeline and leads a top-notch discovery, research and translational medicine team at Chinook focused on advancing our pipeline of novel, precision medicines for kidney disease.”

Tom will be in charge of business development, CMC, quality, new product planning, programme management, and program team leadership for Chinook in his role as COO. Tom co-founded Chinook and became its chief business officer in January 2019. Before joining Chinook, he worked at Versant Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence.

Andrew will be in charge of the discovery research, non-clinical development, and translational medicine teams as CSO. He became the head of renal discovery and translational medicine at Chinook in May 2019. Andrew was a senior director of discovery and translational biology at Ardelyx before joining Chinook, where he and his team were instrumental in delivering small molecule candidates for the medication of cardio-renal diseases and elucidating the novel molecular mechanism of action of tenapanor, which is currently undergoing FDA NDA review for the treatment of hyperphosphatemia in dialysis patients.