Seattle-based biopharmaceutical company Alpine Immune Sciences Inc. (Nasdaq: ALPN) has named U. Martin Fuhs as its chief accounting officer and principal accounting officer.
Fuhs is taking over the principal accounting officer duties from Paul Rickey, Alpine's chief financial officer. Rickey will keep the CFO role at Alpine, which has used underwritten public offerings to raise major funding in recent years.
Fuhs has served as vice president of finance at Alpine since November 2021, the company disclosed in a Friday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Before joining Alpine, he spent more than two years with Carnival Corp. as chief accounting officer of its Holland America and Princess Cruises group. Prior to that, according to his LinkedIn page, Fuhs spent about 10 years in various finance roles with T-Mobile US Inc.
Related coverage
Rickey, meanwhile, has been with Alpine since 2017, according to his LinkedIn page. He spent roughly a year at Sound Pharmaceuticals before that.
Alpine was founded in 2015. The immunotherapy company is focused on protein engineering and is targeting autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Alpine went public in 2017 through a reverse merger with Nivalis Therapeutics, a Boulder, Colorado-based pharmaceutical company that targeted cystic fibrosis.
Alpine's drug ALPN-303 targets autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, and it's in clinical trials for multiple uses. Its other drug, ALPN-101, targets inflammatory diseases and is in clinical trials for a specific type of lupus and preclinical for undisclosed targets. In October 2022, Alpine halted trial enrollment for its drug aimed at cancer, ALPN-202, after a second patient death. Alpine co-founder and CEO Mitchell Gold previously told the Business Journal Alpine has terminated that program.
In November, Alpine raised $150 million, before expenses, through an underwritten public offering, adding to $100 million it raised through an underwritten public offering in September 2022. The company raised $91 million, before expenses, in 2021 through a private placement, a way to raise money by selling shares to select investors.
After the November raise, Gold said the company had runway into 2026. Alpine had $379.9 million in assets as of the end of last year.
Alpine in 2020 signed a $60 million licensing agreement for ALPN-101 with Chicago-based AbbVie. The agreement included up to an additional $805 million if drug hit certain milestones.
