The Long Game
in Precision Medicine
John McHutchison grew up in Australia and trained at the University of Melbourne, earning his MBBS before completing a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in gastroenterology at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. He then crossed the Pacific for a post-doctoral fellowship in liver diseases at the University of Southern California - the kind of move that signals ambition measured in decades, not quarters.
The liver became his territory. He spent nearly ten years at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, California, serving as Medical Director of Liver Transplantation and Director of Gastroenterology and Hepatology. Transplantation medicine has a clarifying effect on a physician's priorities: when patients die waiting for a donor organ, the urgency of finding better treatments stops being abstract.
Durham, Then Gilead
McHutchison moved to Duke University Medical Center, where he became Associate Director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute, Director of the GI/Hepatology Research Program, and a full Professor of Medicine. Duke's research infrastructure suited a physician who increasingly wanted to move upstream - from treating disease to understanding and preventing it at a mechanistic level.
In 2010, Gilead Sciences hired him as Senior Vice President of Liver Disease Therapeutics. What followed was one of the more remarkable drug development runs in recent biotech history. Within four years, his team launched Sovaldi (sofosbuvir), the first drug to achieve high cure rates in hepatitis C patients across multiple genotypes. A year later came Harvoni - the combination pill that achieved over 95% cure rates for the most common genotype. Then Epclusa, a pangenotypic treatment that worked across all six major genotypes of the virus.
The numbers from that period are almost incomprehensible in context. Hepatitis C had infected an estimated 71 million people worldwide. It was a leading cause of liver cirrhosis and liver cancer. The available treatments were slow, toxic, and only partially effective. In about a decade, it became curable. McHutchison was not alone in achieving this - it was a scientific team effort spread across multiple institutions and companies - but his role in shepherding those drugs through development and regulatory approval was central.
From CSO to Epigenomics
In 2018, Gilead elevated McHutchison to Chief Scientific Officer and Head of Research and Development. That same year, the Australian government appointed him Officer of the Order of Australia - one of the country's highest civilian honors - for "distinguished service to medical research in gastroenterology and hepatology, particularly through the development of treatments for viral infections, and to the biopharmaceutical industry." It is a post-nominal that requires spelling out: AO. He earned it.
He left Gilead in 2019 and became President and CEO of Assembly Biosciences, another company focused on hard antiviral targets. He stepped down from the CEO role at Assembly in 2022 but remained on its board - a pattern that would repeat itself.
He joined Tune Therapeutics' board of directors in early 2023 and spent two years watching the company's TEMPO epigenome editing platform develop before accepting the CEO chair in March 2025. Tune had already raised substantial capital - and in January 2025, just weeks before McHutchison formally took over, the company closed a $175 million Series B led by New Enterprise Associates, Yosemite, Regeneron Ventures, and the Hevolution Foundation.
What Tune Is Actually Doing
Epigenome editing is genuinely different from gene editing. Where CRISPR cuts and replaces DNA sequences, epigenome editing adjusts the chemical marks and protein packaging that determine whether genes are active or silent - without changing the underlying sequence. Think of it as turning the volume knob rather than rewriting the lyrics.
Tune's lead program, Tune-401, targets chronic hepatitis B - the same viral territory McHutchison mapped throughout his career, now approached from a completely different angle. Rather than using antivirals to suppress viral replication, Tune-401 aims to epigenetically silence the viral DNA integrated into patient liver cells. If it works in clinical trials, it could represent a functional cure for a disease that currently requires lifelong antiviral suppression for an estimated 296 million infected people worldwide.
The $397 million in total funding Tune has raised reflects a real bet - from serious investors who believe epigenome editing can do for chronic viral disease what sofosbuvir did for hepatitis C. McHutchison has the specific credibility to lead that argument. He was in the room when sofosbuvir moved from molecule to marketed drug. He knows what a functional cure looks like - and what it takes to prove one.
He also holds an adjunct professorship at Duke University's Department of Medicine and serves as Chairman and Director of Comanche Biopharma Australia, appointed in late 2025. He remains a Director at Assembly Biosciences, chairing its Science and Technology Committee. His range of commitments is not unusual for a biotech executive of his stature - but the specific combination reflects a consistent set of interests: antiviral medicine, novel therapeutic modalities, and the long arc from academic research to approved drug.
McHutchison is based in San Francisco. The company he runs is in Durham, North Carolina - a city he knows well from his decade at Duke. He has built a career by moving toward the hardest problems in infectious and liver disease, waiting until the science is ready, and then moving decisively. Tune Therapeutics is the current expression of that pattern. The TEMPO platform is the test.