Seasoned life sciences executive brings deep expertise in scaling organizations and enterprise leadership through transformative growth

insitro, the AI therapeutics company built on causal biology, today announced the appointment of Joe Hand as Chief People Officer. Hand will lead insitro’s global people strategy, overseeing talent, organizational development, and culture, as the company continues to scale its integrated AI and biology platform and progress its differentiated, first-in-class programs toward the clinic.

“insitro was built on the belief that breakthroughs happen at the intersection of exceptional people, technology, and science,” said Daphne Koller, Ph.D., founder and CEO of insitro. “Joe brings deep experience in building and leading people organizations during periods of rapid growth and transformation. His strategic insight and leadership will be vital as we grow our team and strengthen our culture, ensuring our talent strategy is fully aligned with our mission to advance multiple programs toward the clinic and accelerate our unique, AI-driven discovery platforms to bring transformative medicines to patients.”

Hand joins insitro with significant senior leadership experience spanning two decades guiding life sciences organizations through expansion, cultural evolution, and complex corporate transactions. Over nearly a decade at Celgene, he held senior leadership roles including Chief Human Resources Officer, where he modernized the company’s global total rewards architecture, compensation governance, talent acquisition, and HR operations during a period of significant global growth. He served on Celgene’s Executive Committee and Business Development Committee and was the principal architect and lead negotiator for employee-related compensation and benefits matters across several major acquisitions including the $74 billion acquisition of Celgene by Bristol Myers Squibb, the $13 billion divestiture of Otezla to Amgen, the $9 billion acquisition of Juno by Celgene, as well as leading Celgene’s integration of Receptos following its $7.2 billion acquisition.

Earlier in his career, Hand served as Chief of Staff to the CEO at Celgene, where he drove enterprise-wide initiatives across R&D, commercial, and corporate functions. Hand also served as Chief Administrative Officer at Phathom Pharmaceuticals, where he was among the company’s earliest employees. There, he built the HR and total rewards infrastructure from the ground up, implementing modern HR systems and designing a comprehensive equity and rewards framework to support the company’s growth and its transition toward commercialization. Hand holds a J.D. from New York University School of Law and a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Notre Dame.

“I’m honored to join the insitro team at such a pivotal moment, as the company continues to redefine drug discovery through its integrated machine learning and AI platforms to advance potentially transformational therapies for patients with unmet needs,” said Hand. “The opportunity to help shape the culture and people strategy that will power insitro’s next chapter of growth is both humbling and deeply exciting.”

About insitro

insitro is the physical AI company unlocking causal human biology, founded and led by AI pioneer Daphne Koller. By generating the world’s largest integrated multi-modal corpus of human and cellular data, we’ve built the Virtual Human™ – a genetically anchored causal AI engine that reveals how disease begins, progresses, and can be resolved. Our platform enables us to precisely identify causal genetic drivers and deploy our TherML™ AI platform to design optimal medicines, advancing a broad pipeline of therapeutics for neuroscience and metabolic diseases. This industrialized architecture creates a self-learning loop: with every biology we onboard, our predictive models grow smarter, accelerating discovery across scales of biology. Backed by ~$800M in capital from world-class investors like a16z, ARCH, Blackrock, Casdin, CPP, Foresite, GV, Softbank, Temasek, Third Rock, T. Rowe Price – including ~$150M in revenue from partnerships with BMS, Lilly, and Gilead – insitro is rebuilding drug discovery from an unpredictable journey into an industrialized, repeatable process with scalable impact for patients and the world.

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