Marin County’s Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical hires new chief financial officer

Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical has appointed Howard Horn as its new chief financial officer and executive vice president for corporate strategy.

Effective Oct. 16, Horn is set to be responsible for leading the finance, accounting, corporate strategy and investor relations functions, the Novato-based maker of treatments for rare genetic disorders announced Wednesday.

Horn would join Ultragenyx from Vir Biotechnology, where he was finance chief from March 2017 to April of this year. As a member of Vir’s founding management team, he successfully led a series of private and public financings, and executed multiple foundational transactions that supported the rapid transformation of Vir to a public, commercial-stage organization.

Previously, Horn served as vice president, business planning at Biogen, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based global biotechnology company. There, he led Biogen's resource allocation processes across all functions and regions.

Earlier in his career, Horn held positions of increasing responsibility as a consultant in the pharmaceutical and medical products practice at McKinsey & Company, and as an equity research analyst in the life sciences group at UBS Group AG.

“This is an exciting time to join the company, which I believe is poised for global commercial leadership in rare disease,” Horn said in the announcement. “And I'm looking forward to working closely with the leadership team and board on the next phase of growth.”

Horn holds a bachelor of arts degree in economics from Princeton University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

“Howard is joining Ultragenyx and its leadership team during a pivotal period as our robust late-stage pipeline is maturing and we are preparing for the next phase of company growth,” Emil D. Kakkis, Ultragenyx president and CEO, said in the news release. “Howard is a seasoned leader with strategic finance and business planning expertise, which will support our efforts to deliver multiple promising therapies to the global rare disease community over the next several years.”