Biotech industry veteran and former Chief Business Officer at Belharra Therapeutics joins Xaira to help scale partnerships for its AI-enabled drug discovery platform

Xaira Therapeutics today announced the appointment of Dr. Rachel Lane as Senior Vice President, Business Development and Operations, reporting to President and COO Jeff Jonker. In this role, Dr. Lane will work closely with Jonker and CEO Marc Tessier-Lavigne to oversee the business development strategy, align them with Xaira’s scientific vision and drive partnerships to integrate cutting-edge machine learning with therapeutic development to accelerate the discovery of life-changing medicines.

“We are thrilled to have Rachel join Xaira to help drive our dealmaking and further optimize operations across the organization," said Jeff Jonker, President and COO of Xaira Therapeutics. “With her broad experiences as a scientist, Wall Street research analyst, investor, and business development executive, she is a valuable addition to the Xaira team.”

Dr. Lane brings over a decade of leadership experience across the biotech industry as both an operator and investor. She most recently served as Chief Business Officer at Belharra Therapeutics, where she architected and closed multiple major transactions, including flagship platform partnerships with Genentech and Sanofi. Prior to Belharra, she was a member of the core investment team at Versant Ventures and CBO at Inception Therapeutics. She holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology and postdoctoral training in neurology.

“I could not be more excited to join Xaira at such a pivotal moment in the evolution of AI and drug discovery,” said Dr. Rachel Lane. “From target identification to drug design to patient stratification, Xaira is addressing all three core challenges of drug discovery as both a platform and a pipeline company. Few companies are better positioned than Xaira to shape the next generation of AI models and deploy them to develop differentiated therapeutics.”

This month, Xaira launched X-Cell, its first publicly-disclosed virtual cell model. Trained on causal, interventional data at unprecedented scale, X-Cell achieves state-of-the-art performance in accurately predicting the outcomes of genetic perturbations — including experiments the model has never seen. This marks a meaningful step toward transforming drug discovery from a trial-and-error process into a predictive engineering discipline. X-Cell is trained on X-Atlas/Pisces, the largest genome-wide CRISPRi Perturb-seq dataset ever created: 25.6 million perturbed single-cell transcriptomes across seven biologically diverse cellular contexts, more than three times the scale of Xaira's previous dataset, X-Atlas/Orion. The model reaches 4.9 billion parameters, the largest causal perturbation model built to date, and follows the same power-law scaling dynamics observed in large language models.

About Xaira Therapeutics

Xaira Therapeutics is an AI life sciences company creating frontier machine learning models to discern the language of life and deliver transformative medicines to patients. Xaira seeks to recreate the drug discovery and development process from end-to-end by bringing together leading talent across three core areas: machine learning research to produce powerful, predictive models of disease, therapeutic design, and patient care; massive data generation at scale to train that artificial intelligence; and integrated drug discovery and development to create new medicines. Xaira is headquartered in South San Francisco with innovation centers in Seattle and London.

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“I could not be more excited to join Xaira at such a pivotal moment in the evolution of AI and drug discovery."