Irene Rombel | President and CEO
BioCurie

Irene Rombel, PhD, MBA Chief Executive Officer, President, Board Chair Dr. Irene Rombel is the CEO, President, and Co-Founder of BioCurie, an Applied DeepTech company located in the greater Philadelphia region. BioCurie is pioneering mechanistic artificial intelligence (mAI) to revolutionize the development and manufacturing of cell, gene, and nucleic acid therapies (CGT). Irene is an industry veteran with 25+ years of leadership experience in science and business, spanning biotechnology, big pharma, consulting, investing, and academia. Prior to founding BioCurie, Irene was Chief of Staff, Research, at Spark Therapeutics; Senior Director of Strategy and External Innovation at Johnson & Johnson; Founder and President of Biomedical Intelligence LLC, a life science consulting company; and a biotechnology hedge fund analyst. Dr. Rombel started her career in academia as an Assistant Professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center in the Center for Biomedical Inventions, leading research on DNA vaccines, synthetic biology, and cell-specific targeting. Her postdoctoral research on transcriptional regulation at UC Berkeley and UC Davis made fundamental scientific contributions to the understanding of promoter-enhancer control of gene expression. Dr. Rombel is on Columbia University’s Translational Therapeutics Accelerator Steering Committee and the Columbia University Irving Cancer Drug Discovery Advisory Board. Irene received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and B.Sc. (First Class Honors) in Biochemistry from the University of Otago, New Zealand, and her MBA from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. Irene is also a registered U.S. Patent Agent.