Bellicum Pharmaceuticals announced on Tuesday that an experienced in-house attorney at pharmaceutical and health care companies will become its new general counsel.

The Houston-based pharmaceutical company announced that Shane Ward will become the company's general counsel and corporate secretary. In that role he will lead the legal, compliance and corporate governance functions for the company.

Ward's first day as GC was on Tuesday.

Ward takes over for Ken Mosley, who worked as the senior vice president and general counsel at Bellicum for six years from December 2011 to December 2017, according to Mosley's Linkedin profile. It is not clear why Mosley stepped down from the GC role at Bellicum and a spokesperson for Bellicum did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rick Fair, president and CEO of Bellicum, said in the press release that he was excited to have Ward join the executive team. Bellicum is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company that focuses on developing “cellular immunotherapies” for cancers and “orphan inherited blood disorders.”

“His expertise in managing public company governance and in navigating the legal and regulatory requirements for development and commercialization of novel biotechnology products will be vital as we advance our CAR-T and TCR pipeline,” Fair said in the release.

Ward, in the press release, said he was also excited to begin working at Bellicum and to “work with the team to advance its controllable cell therapy pipeline and prepare for the potential commercialization of BPX-501 in Europe.”

“I believe that Bellicum's novel platform, designed to address efficacy and safety limitations of current generation cellular immunotherapies, is very exciting and can enable treatment for a broad range of cancers,” Ward said.

Ward graduated from the Georgetown University Law Center, according to his Linkedin profile. In 2001 he began work as an associate for Sidley Austin. Ward began working in-house in 2003 when he was hired as senior counsel for Abbot, a hospital and health care company in Illinois. Ward then became senior director for Gilead Sciences in 2006. In 2010, he became associate general counsel at Human Genome Services. Ward then became vice president of compliance and associate general counsel of Dynavax Technologies in 2012. His first job as general counsel came in 2015 when he was hired for the role by Versartis Inc.