The person who sets a drug company's clinical strategy and oversees how patient trials are designed is called the chief medical officer. Rigel Pharmaceuticals has filled that seat, hiring Alison Hannah as executive vice president and chief medical officer. She held the same combined title at CytomX Therapeutics before joining Rigel.
What the title carries
"Chief medical officer" is the executive responsible for the medical and scientific direction of a drug company's development programs. That means deciding how trials are structured and what outcomes they are powered to detect. Get those design calls wrong early and the data may not answer the right question years later.
The "executive vice president" portion tells you where Hannah sits in the leadership structure: above a standard vice president, in the inner ring of decision-making. At a drug company, that level of seniority puts the CMO in conversations about the overall pipeline direction, the individual trials included.
The experience she brings
CMO roles at pharmaceutical companies are genuinely hard to fill. The job combines clinical rigor with investor-facing communication. When a trial produces a readout, the CMO is often the one explaining what the numbers mean to regulators and investors who were not in the clinic.
Hannah arrives with direct experience in that seat. At CytomX Therapeutics, she carried the executive vice president and chief medical officer title before this move. That background means the learning curve at Rigel starts further along.
The report disclosing the hire did not include a start date or additional details about her priorities in the new role. CytomX Therapeutics is the last named employer in her career path before Rigel.