The scientist who learned to sell, now running an alpha-therapy company measured in cell diameters.
Philina Lee, PhD - Chief Executive Officer, AdvanCell. / via citybiz
On the first day of 2026, Philina Lee took the top job at AdvanCell, a clinical-stage radiopharmaceutical company whose entire premise rests on a metal called lead. Not the plumbing kind. Lead-212, a radioactive isotope with a half-life measured in hours, chosen because it throws off an alpha particle that travels no farther than a few cells before it stops. In cancer, that short range is the whole point. Hit the tumor, spare the neighbors.
Lee is the person now responsible for turning that physics into medicine at scale. She is a first-time chief executive, but not a newcomer to the field. Alpha therapy has followed her, or she has followed it, for most of a career that began at a laboratory bench and detoured, unusually, into the commercial side of drug-making.
Most biotech CEOs are one thing wearing the costume of the other. A scientist who tolerates the business, or a businessperson who nods along in the science meetings. Lee is genuinely both. She holds a PhD in cell biology from MIT and spent years running commercial strategy for an oncology company that a pharmaceutical giant paid roughly $9.5 billion to own. That combination is rare enough to be the headline.
AdvanCell is pioneering a new class of targeted alpha therapies with tremendous potential to transform cancer treatment.
AdvanCell started in Australia - Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide - and its founder Andrew Adamovich built it around a proprietary Lead-212 platform. The company's lead candidate, 212Pb-ADVC001, is a PSMA-targeting radioligand aimed at prostate cancer. The targeting molecule finds the cancer; the isotope does the damage. Early Phase 1b data reported an objective response in every RECIST-measurable lesion the trial could measure, with an encouraging safety profile. Signals like that are why the company raised a $112 million Series C and started looking west, across the Pacific, toward Boston.
That is where Lee comes in. Her mandate is expansion: standing up US clinical, manufacturing, and partnership operations, and moving the company's center of gravity from Brisbane toward the Cambridge biotech corridor where she is based. The founder did not disappear. Adamovich stayed on as Managing Director for Australia and kept his board seat. The handoff is a growth handoff, not a rescue.
Alpha particles are heavy and slow to travel. They dump their energy over a very short distance - roughly the width of a few cells - which is exactly what you want when the target is a tumor cell and the thing you are protecting is everything around it.
Illustrative comparison of particle range, not to scale.
The thread is alpha. Before AdvanCell, before Blueprint, Lee held senior US roles at Algeta ASA, the Norwegian company that - with Bayer - launched Xofigo, the first and only approved targeted alpha therapy. She helped build the organization that put an alpha drug on the market. Not a theory of alpha therapy. The real, approved, prescribed article.
Then came Blueprint Medicines. She joined in 2014 as a Senior Director for new product strategy and climbed through a stack of commercial roles - strategy, operations, patient services, marketing, the precision-medicine field team - until she was Chief Commercial Officer. Blueprint built its name in oncology and mast cell disorders, and in 2025 Sanofi acquired it for about $9.5 billion. Lee also served on the board of Fusion Pharmaceuticals, another radiopharmaceutical name, which kept her close to the isotope world even while her day job was elsewhere.
So the AdvanCell appointment is less a leap than a return. She spent a decade learning how to commercialize precision oncology drugs, and now she gets to point that machinery at the field where she started.
Philina brings a rare combination of global commercial leadership, deep radiopharmaceutical expertise, and an outstanding record of building high-growth organizations.
The origin is quieter than the résumé. A Bachelor of Science in biochemistry from the University of Alberta in 1998. A PhD in cell biology from MIT in 2004. That is a training in how cells actually work at the molecular level - which is a strange and useful foundation for someone who would later spend her days deciding how a therapy reaches the patients who need it.
The pattern in her career is a person who kept refusing to specialize into a single lane. Bench science, then commercial strategy. Operations, then patient services. A board seat in radiopharma while running commercial at a different oncology company. Each move added a language. By the time the CEO offer came, she could speak to the chemist, the regulator, the sales team, and the investor without a translator in the room.
She bridges lab and market - a cell biology PhD who became a Chief Commercial Officer, then a CEO.
Alpha therapy runs through her whole career: Algeta's Xofigo, then AdvanCell's Lead-212 platform.
The particles her company harnesses travel only a few cell diameters before they stop.
Her arrival moves AdvanCell's operational base from Brisbane toward Boston.
Radiopharmaceuticals are having a moment. The big deals, the isotope supply crunch, the race to lock up manufacturing - the field has gone from niche to contested. AdvanCell's advantage is its Lead-212 production technology and generator approach, the unglamorous plumbing of getting a short-lived isotope from a reactor to a patient before it decays into uselessness. Lee's job is to turn a promising trial signal and a clever supply chain into a company that can actually deliver treatment.
She is doing it as a first-time CEO, which sounds like a risk until you notice she has done every adjacent job. She built the commercial organization for an approved alpha drug. She ran commercial for a company that sold for billions. She sat on the board of a radiopharma peer. The CEO chair is the one seat she had not yet occupied, and she is stepping into it in the exact domain she knows best.
The measure of her tenure will be simple and brutal, the way biotech always is: does 212Pb-ADVC001, and the pipeline behind it, become a medicine that patients receive? The physics is elegant. The chemistry is proprietary. The early numbers are loud. Now someone has to build the company that turns all of it into a bottle on a shelf and an infusion in a clinic. That someone is Philina Lee.