Connect with us

Technology

ChronicleBio Is Coming for Chronic Disease: Pioneering Immunologist Joins Elite Scientific Team to Translate Biological Signal into Targeted Therapeutics

Published

on

The Emerging Techbio Company Appoints Dr. John Mumm as CSO Alongside Head of Platform Dr. Yambazi Banda to Decode the Molecular Underpinnings of Neuroimmune Conditions

SAN FRANCISCO, June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — ChronicleBio, a data-driven techbio company harnessing advances in multi-omics and artificial intelligence, announced the appointment of John Mumm, Ph.D., as Chief Scientific Officer. Mumm, a three-decade immunology innovator, serial founder, and author of more than 30 peer-reviewed publications who carries multiple patents, brings transformational drug-development expertise to a company that is challenging how the world understands and treats diseases long written off as idiopathic or incurable.

“My time in immuno-oncology and autoimmunity taught me that ‘one disease’ is almost always three or four mechanistically distinct diseases sharing a clinical label, and that the right biomarker turns a 20% response rate into a 70% response rate. I’m bringing that same stratification playbook to neuroimmune disorders,” Mumm said.

Mumm joins ChronicleBio’s Head of Platform, Yambazi Banda, Ph.D., a computational biology leader whose career spans particle physics at Oxford to leading population-scale genomics at UCSF and Ancestry.com. Together, they form the scientific leadership core of a startup building the infrastructure to end the era of trial-and-error medicine for millions of patients with neuroimmune conditions like ME/CFS, Long COVID, and POTS.

“There is a gap between what’s possible and what has been done that we aim to fill. The system has effectively given up on millions of patients because their syndromes have long been thought to be too complex to take on, but we know they are actually tractable molecular problems we can solve with the right therapeutic targets,” Mumm said.

Mumm brings to ChronicleBio an unmatched track record at the intersection of cytokine biology, immunology, and precision medicine. He is the founder and former CEO of Deka Biosciences, where he created the Diakine® platform, engineered dual-cytokine therapeutics designed to precisely modulate immune responses in cancer and inflammatory disease. Under his leadership, Deka advanced from inception to FDA clearance for a Phase 1 clinical trial within 18 months of a Series A and completed a 39-patient basket trial in 12 months.

Mumm is also a founding member of ARMO BioSciences, which was acquired by Eli Lilly for $1.6 billion in 2018. He played a central role in developing pegylated IL-10 (AM0010), a first-in-class immunotherapy. His earlier roles at Merck Research Labs, MedImmune, and Schering-Plough span CAR-T development, inflammasome-based neoantigen screening, and novel cytokine-based therapeutics.

ChronicleBio was built on the premise that the defining failure mode in chronic disease research is the absence of mechanism-anchored patient stratification. Without it, clinical trials are designed to fail, as responders and non-responders cancel each other out. The company’s multi-omic endotype framework addresses this directly, integrating whole-genome sequencing, epigenetics, RNA sequencing, immune profiling, proteomics, and metabolomics to identify biologically coherent patient subgroups before treatment begins. The goal is to determine which therapy is most likely to work for which patient and which clinical-stage drugs might be used for those the current standard of care fails, disrupting a historically ineffective therapeutic pipeline. 

“I have conducted research in various fields of science from particle physics to statistical genetics and computational biology with the goal of helping answer some of humanity’s pressing questions. The work being done at ChronicleBio, however, inspires me in a way that I have not been before,” Banda said. 

Over the past year, Banda has been laying the scientific and technology foundation for this success. A Rhodes Scholar holding a D.Phil. in Particle Physics from Oxford, he built his career through postdoctoral research at UCSF, senior roles at Ancestry.com leading population genetics algorithm development and FDA 510(k) statistical submissions, and a directorship at Ambys Medicines overseeing NGS pipeline development in the gene and cell therapy space. Banda brings a rare combination of statistical rigor, computational depth, and translational experience to the platform. He previously served as Executive Director of Spectrum Biobank, a non-profit dedicated to closing the genetic data diversity gap, and brings that commitment to equity and scientific inclusivity to ChronicleBio’s biobank operations and external partnerships.

“When you combine fast-paced technology, both compute infrastructure and algorithms development, with a highly invested group of individuals, barriers to success diminish quickly. What we’ve managed to build at ChronicleBio in only one year is evidence of genuine dedication to help find health solutions,” Banda said.

What unites Mumm and Banda is a shared conviction that the chronic disease crisis, which affects hundreds of millions of patients worldwide, is a solvable biological problem that has simply not been attacked with the right tools.

“The team treats every patient sample as a falsifiable hypothesis rather than a data point,” Mumm said. “That intellectual honesty is rare, and it’s the only mindset that actually moves potential treatments for chronic disease forward.”

It’s those tools in the hands of the right team, which ChronicleBio’s leadership is methodically establishing, that are creating a curative model for a chronically broken system.

ABOUT CHRONICLEBIO
ChronicleBio is a data-driven biotechnology company applying multi-omic endotyping and artificial intelligence to decode the molecular architecture of complex chronic conditions. The company’s platform integrates biobanking, advanced computational biology, and translational science to stratify patients by disease mechanism — enabling the development of precision diagnostics and therapeutic strategies for neuroimmune conditions.

Media Contact:
media@chroniclebio.com

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chroniclebio-is-coming-for-chronic-disease-pioneering-immunologist-joins-elite-scientific-team-to-translate-biological-signal-into-targeted-therapeutics-302798588.html

SOURCE ChronicleBio

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Technology

SmartOrg releases Version 10.x of its Decision Intelligence platform

Published

on

By

New release expands SmartOrg’s Decision Intelligence platform with a cleaner, more configurable experience and new product capabilities.

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — SmartOrg, Inc., a Palo Alto-based provider of Decision Intelligence solutions, today announced the release of version 10.x of its software platform, with its standard products Innovation Navigator® and Portfolio Navigator® now deployed by configuring modules on a newly integrated platform.

“This release is really about giving customers a better experience and more flexibility in how they apply the platform to their specific decision challenges.”

Combined in other ways, these modules support deployments optimized for other contexts.

“This release is really about giving customers a better experience and more flexibility in how they apply the platform to their specific decision challenges,” said David Matheson, President and CEO of SmartOrg. “We’re delighted to see customers using SmartOrg’s Decision Intelligence Platform in more targeted ways, for example in Technology Assessment, Energy Exploration and Drug Discovery. Version 10.x gives them a cleaner, more configurable foundation for doing that work.”

The release includes major updates to Innovation Navigator®, including flexible brainstorming canvases, enhanced Learning Plan modules, and upgraded Discovery Grid visualizations. These enhancements help innovation teams capture ideas, organize learning activities, and focus attention on the uncertainties that matter most.

Portfolio Navigator® also receives significant new capabilities, including a Maturity Matrix, Probability of Success calculator, and portfolio goal analysis. These features help leaders better assess projects, compare them, and support portfolio decisions.

“Version 10.x is part of our ongoing commitment to keeping SmartOrg’s software current, useful, and easier for customers to apply,” said Dave Wachenschwanz, Director of Development at SmartOrg. “The platform has significant upgrades in its user interface, improving consistency and usability.”

To see highlights of the new release, SmartOrg has published a short video overview from its development team that you can watch here: https://bit.ly/4xdA7QY

About SmartOrg

SmartOrg helps innovation, R&D, and strategy teams convert uncertainty to opportunity. Its software products—Innovation Navigator® and Portfolio Navigator®—apply quantitative methods to prioritize learning, build confidence in the business case, and guide investment decisions at both the project and portfolio levels to help organizations meet their growth objectives.

Media Contact

Doug Williams, SmartOrg, Inc., 1 3399270834, dwilliams@smartorg.com, https://smartorg.com

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prweb.com/releases/smartorg-releases-version-10x-of-its-decision-intelligence-platform-302796404.html

SOURCE SmartOrg, Inc.

Continue Reading

Technology

Cathay Financial Holdings Leverages Open-Source Small Language Models to Identify Customer Intent

Published

on

By

Fine-tuning Small Language Models to Better Understand Local Financial Service Contexts, Domain Terminology, and Ambiguous Customer Queries

TAIPEI, June 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — To enhance operational efficiency and customer experience, Cathay Financial Holdings (Cathay FHC) continues to advance the application of generative AI in financial services through its generative AI technical framework, GAIA, and AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) strategy. Building on last year’s validation of large language models (LLMs) for financial applications, Cathay FHC recently unveiled its latest AI research findings at NVIDIA GTC Taipei 2026, demonstrating how open-source small language models (SLMs) can be fine-tuned for customer intent classification and applied to future financial service scenarios.

The study evaluated several leading open-source models from Meta, TAIDE, TAME, NVIDIA and OpenAI. Preliminary results showed that, under the testing framework, fine-tuned SLMs may reduce dependence on complex prompt engineering and vector retrieval modules, potentially simplifying system architecture while lowering future operational and maintenance complexity.

The findings indicated that, when combined with carefully designed financial-domain datasets and targeted model fine-tuning, SLMs can further improve model stability, inference efficiency, and deployment controllability. In customer intent classification, the fine-tuned SLM achieved performance close to mainstream closed-source LLMs, approaching that of leading proprietary LLMs, providing enterprises with a practical reference for evaluating AI model training and deployment strategies.

From a data governance and privacy perspective, the study adopted a fully synthetic data approach, ensuring that no real customer information was used during model training. Through techniques including service-function clustering, single-intent and multi-intent dataset design, Taiwan-context localization, and keyword expansion, Cathay FHC strengthened the model’s ability to understand local financial service contexts, industry-specific terminology, and ambiguous customer queries.

Potential future applications include mortgage balance inquiries, credit card payment assistance, and branch service navigation, laying the groundwork for intelligent search, service routing, and next-generation customer engagement experiences.

From a technical architecture standpoint, Cathay FHC integrated NVIDIA AI tools—including NVIDIA NeMo Customizer, NVIDIA NeMo Curator, and NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM—together with NVIDIA Hopper architecture computing resources to support data generation, model fine-tuning, inference optimization, and experimental evaluation. Leveraging NVIDIA AI ecosystem, Cathay FHC continues to strengthen its capabilities in financial-domain model development, data governance, and application validation.

In recent years, Cathay FHC has steadily expanded AI innovation across a wide range of financial scenarios, building scalable technological foundations spanning internal process optimization, customer service enhancement, financial knowledge understanding, and model governance. As financial institutions navigate an increasingly regulated environment, stringent data governance requirements, and rapidly evolving customer expectations, Cathay FHC remains committed to advancing AI research in a compliant, secure, and resilient manner.

Looking ahead, Cathay FHC will continue exploring long-context classification, advanced financial document understanding, and cross-scenario AI applications. By developing model training and deployment approaches tailored to the financial sector, the company aims to accelerate innovation and create more intelligent, efficient, and customer-centric financial services.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/cathay-financial-holdings-leverages-open-source-small-language-models-to-identify-customer-intent-302798631.html

SOURCE Cathay Financial Holdings

Continue Reading

Technology

First Advantage Set to Join S&P SmallCap 600

Published

on

By

NEW YORK, June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — First Advantage Corporation (NASD: FA) will replace Kennedy-Wilson Holdings Inc. (NYSE: KW) in the S&P SmallCap 600 effective prior to the opening of trading on Tuesday, June 16. A consortium led by KW’s CEO with Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited (TSE: FFH) is acquiring Kennedy-Wilson Holdings in a deal expected to close soon, pending final closing conditions.

Following is a summary of the changes that will take place prior to the open of trading on the effective date:

Effective Date     

Index Name      

Action

Company Name

Ticker     

GICS Sector     

June 16, 2026

S&P SmallCap 600     

Addition     

First Advantage

FA

Industrials

June 16, 2026

S&P SmallCap 600

Deletion

Kennedy-Wilson Holdings     

KW

Real Estate

ABOUT S&P DOW JONES INDICES

S&P Dow Jones Indices is the largest global resource for essential index-based concepts, data and research, and home to iconic financial market indicators, such as the S&P 500® and the Dow Jones Industrial Average®. More assets are invested in products based on our indices than products based on indices from any other provider in the world. Since Charles Dow invented the first index in 1884, S&P DJI has been innovating and developing indices across the spectrum of asset classes helping to define the way investors measure and trade the markets.

S&P Dow Jones Indices is a division of S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI), which provides essential intelligence for individuals, companies, and governments to make decisions with confidence. For more information, visit www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

S&P Dow Jones Indices
index_services@spglobal.com 

Media Inquiries
spdji.comms@spglobal.com 

 

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/first-advantage-set-to-join-sp-smallcap-600-302798639.html

SOURCE S&P Dow Jones Indices

Continue Reading

Trending