A chief medical officer (the executive who owns a company's clinical strategy and translates scientific findings into decisions the broader organization can act on) has taken a new position. Teresa Nunes, who held that title at Allucent, has been hired into the same role at EpilepsyGTx. The appointment appeared in STAT+'s "Up and down the ladder," the publication's regular feature on executive moves across health and life sciences.
What a chief medical officer actually does
The CMO is not a ceremonial title. She is the person who sits with trial data, decides what it actually says, and carries that interpretation into leadership conversations and regulatory discussions.
The decisions are consequential. She determines whether a trial endpoint is worth measuring and whether a program still has enough scientific rationale to justify continued spending. Getting this wrong in either direction carries cost: running a failing program too long depletes the cash runway, and stopping a viable one too early destroys value.
Medical affairs is typically part of the portfolio as well. This includes maintaining relationships with the clinical investigators who run the trials and overseeing safety reporting. At a company whose name signals a focus on epilepsy, that work is active from day one.
The chair is hard to fill. The person must communicate with authority to two audiences that speak different languages: clinicians want to know whether the science is sound, and investors want to know when and how much. The ones who can move between those two modes credibly tend to carry a CMO title from one company to the next.
The appointment
Nunes comes to EpilepsyGTx from Allucent, where she held the same title. She has done this before.
The STAT+ column does not report what programs she will oversee or why the position was open. Those specifics sit behind the publication's paywall.
The public record: a name, a company, and the title she carried before this one.