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:
[email protected]
SOURCE ChronicleBio
Share this article