Josh Carle

His product is the handshake

Walk into a 20-person biotech in Burlingame and you will find scientists at the bench and, somewhere near the deals, Josh Carle. His job is the part of drug development nobody writes movies about: the licensing agreement, the term sheet, the partnership that turns a promising antibody into a funded program. At Hinge Bio he is Chief Business Officer, and the company he sells is one most people have never heard of, building a class of drug most people could not describe.

Here is the wager he has chosen. Hinge Bio's lead candidate, HB2198, targets two proteins on B cells - CD19 and CD20 - at once, while recruiting natural killer cells to do the clearing. In preclinical animal studies it depleted B cells more deeply and more quickly than other antibody therapies have reported. The disease in the crosshairs is systemic lupus, an autoimmune condition where the body's own B cells turn on it. Carle's task is to make sure the science never stalls for want of capital or a partner.

In January 2025 that task paid off in public. Hinge Bio closed a $30 million Series A' led by Point72, with Ridgeback Capital, InVivium Capital and Lightswitch Capital alongside. The money buys HB2198 a path into a Phase 1 trial and keeps the rest of the pipeline moving. Carle joined two years before the raise, in January 2023, as the company expanded its senior team specifically to push its GEM-DIMER programs toward the clinic. The timing was not an accident.

The road to Burlingame ran through big pharma

Before the startup, Carle spent two decades on both sides of the deal table. At Pfizer he drove business development strategy, commercial assessments and transaction support for the company's oncology licensing and M&A. Before Pfizer, he held roles of increasing responsibility in business development at Daiichi Sankyo, and earlier still at Clearview Projects, a strategic advisory firm built around licensing and M&A for biopharma. The thread is consistent: he is the person who sits between the science and the capital and translates one into the other.

His most recent stop before Hinge Bio was Triumvira Immunologics, a next-generation immuno-oncology company, where he was Vice President of Business Development. There he executed a clinical collaboration around a leading checkpoint inhibitor, in-licensed a novel antibody, and signed multiple agreements with global pharma and cell therapy companies. It reads like a syllabus for exactly the job he holds now.

Why a dealmaker leaves the giants for twenty people

There is a particular kind of executive who spends years inside Pfizer and Daiichi Sankyo and then walks into a company that could fit in a conference room. The math, for Carle, seems to have been simpler than it looks from outside. A big platform invented by a serious scientist, a clear lead indication, and a clean runway to do the kind of partnership-building he has done his whole career - this time with real ownership of the outcome rather than as one cog in a multinational machine.

The platform he is selling, GEM-DIMER, was invented by Hinge Bio's Chief Scientific Officer, Daniel Capon. Capon is not a minor figure: he is a co-inventor of recombinant Factor VIII for hemophilia and of three foundational technologies that reshaped biological therapy - Fc fusion proteins at Genentech, the chimeric antigen receptors that underpin modern T cell therapy at Cell Genesys, and the genetically modified mice that produce fully human antibodies at Abgenix. When Carle pitches the science, he is pitching a lineage.

What GEM-DIMER actually does

Strip away the trademark and the idea is this: instead of one antibody binding one target, GEM-DIMER builds multivalent, multispecific antibody therapeutics designed to bind their targets cooperatively. That cooperation is meant to produce dramatically enhanced biological activity and functions a conventional antibody cannot manage. The platform claims three things partners care about - flexibility across targets, relative ease of manufacture, and applicability across cancer, inflammatory disease and autoimmunity. Those three claims are, not coincidentally, exactly the selling points a Chief Business Officer needs.

The credentials, briefly

Carle read economics at the University of Pennsylvania and earned his MBA from the Villanova School of Business. It is a finance and strategy education applied, for twenty years, to molecules. He does not need to be the one who designs the antibody. He needs to be the one who can explain to a room of investors and prospective partners why this antibody is worth their money and their name - and then get the agreement signed.

That is the role at its essence. In a company of twenty, the science is necessary but not sufficient. Someone has to turn the promise of deeper, faster B cell depletion into a Phase 1 budget, into a partnership, into a deal. At Hinge Bio, that someone is Josh Carle.

Sources: Hinge Bio, Hinge Bio 2023 announcement, Hinge Bio Series A release, BioPharma Reporter, Pulse 2.0. Profile reflects publicly reported facts only.