SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan 8, 2026--
Rune Labs, the leader in precision medicine for neurology, today announced Amy Gordon Franzen as its new Chief Executive Officer. Amy will lead the company’s next stage of growth, leveraging its success in Parkinson’s Disease, where it has established StrivePD as the industry’s preeminent AI platform and patient app. The company is actively expanding this platform to address additional neurological conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Co-founder Brian Pepin will become President, Biopharma and Platform, where he will lead Rune Labs’ expanding biopharma partnerships and research portfolio.
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Franzen joins Rune from Tempus, where she played a foundational role in shaping the company’s trajectory from its formative stages into a leading precision-medicine platform used widely across healthcare. As Senior Vice President and General Manager at Tempus, she built and scaled a high-growth clinical trial organization by expanding its data assets and forging new provider and biopharma partnerships that accelerated enrollment across interventional and observational oncology trials. Before joining Tempus, she held leadership roles at Groupon, Nike, and McKinsey & Company, driving growth initiatives and operational improvements across each organization.
“As Rune Labs grows, the work ahead increasingly depends on commercial expansion and deeper alignment with clinicians, payers, and pharma leaders,” said Pepin. “Amy has spent her career building exactly those kinds of partnerships. Bringing Amy on board strengthens the company in ways that will help us reach more patients and providers, while allowing me to continue expanding the biopharma programs that have become a core part of our business.”
Since its launch in 2022, the company’s StrivePD patient engagement platform has evolved into a software ecosystem that supports remote care, AI-enabled symptom tracking and patient reports, and real-world evidence generation for people with Parkinson’s. As the company expands beyond Parkinson’s, it is extending its continuous data and AI infrastructure across the broader aging population - empowering patients with ongoing insight into their condition while working with payers, health systems, and life sciences partners to generate real-world evidence, strengthen trial design and recruitment, and support scalable reimbursement pathways for digitally enabled neurological care.
Franzen’s appointment follows the recent addition of Adam Pellegrini to the Board of Directors, whose background in AI-driven care and reimbursement strategy adds valuable perspective to the team. The appointment of these two seasoned healthcare leaders reflects Rune Labs’ robust foundation and long-term potential to advance the next generation of precision neurology.
“StrivePD has already transformed how people with Parkinson’s understand and manage their disease,” said Franzen. “Our next chapter is about scale – extending the commercial and clinical infrastructure needed to deliver AI-enabled care across all neurology and more deeply integrating with trial sponsors, payers, and health systems.”
About Rune Labs
Rune Labs is a precision medicine company focused on neurology, supporting care delivery and therapy development using the most advanced AI and FDA-cleared algorithms. StrivePD is the company's care delivery ecosystem, which started in Parkinson's disease, empowering patients and their clinicians to take control and better manage their care by providing access to easy to understand insights based on summarized objective and subjective data to improve treatment decisions, enhance disease management and connect patients to clinical trials. For therapeutic development, biopharma and medical device companies leverage Rune's technology, extensive network of engaged clinicians and patients, and large longitudinal real-world datasets to expedite development programs. The company has received financial backing from leading investors such as Nexus NeuroTech, Eclipse Ventures, DigiTx, TruVenturo and Moment Ventures. For more information, please visit runelabs.io and strive.group.
Pictured: Amy Gordon Franzen, new CEO at Rune Labs
A quarterback reportedly reneging on a lucrative deal to hit the transfer portal, only to return to his original school. Another starting QB, this one in the College Football Playoff, awaiting approval from the NCAA to play next season, an expensive NIL deal apparently hanging in the balance. A defensive star, sued by his former school after transferring, filing a lawsuit of his own.
It is easy to see why many observers say things are a mess in college football even amid a highly compelling postseason.
“It gets crazier and crazier. It really, really does,” said Sam Ehrlich, a Boise State legal studies professor who tracks litigation against the NCAA. He said he might have to add a new section for litigation against the NCAA stemming just from transfer portal issues.
“I think a guy signing a contract and then immediately deciding he wants to go to another school, that’s a kind of a new thing,” he said. “Not new kind of historically when you think about all the contract jumping that was going on in the ’60s and ’70s with the NBA. But it’s a new thing for college sports, that’s for sure.”
Washington quarterback Demond Williams Jr. said late Thursday he will return to school for the 2026 season rather than enter the transfer portal, avoiding a potentially messy dispute amid reports the Huskers were prepared to pursue legal options to enforce Williams’ name, image and likeness contract.
Edge rusher Damon Wilson is looking to transfer after one season at Missouri, having been sued for damages by Georgia over his decision to leave the Bulldogs. He has countersued.
Then there is Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss, who reportedly has a new NIL deal signed but is awaiting an NCAA waiver allowing him to play another season as he and the Rebels played Thursday night's Collge Football Playoff semifinal against Miami. On the Hurricanes roster: Defensive back Xavier Lucas, whose transfer from Wisconsin led to a lawsuit against the Hurricanes last year with the Badgers claiming he was improperly lured by NIL money. Lucas has played all season for Miami. The case is pending.
Court rulings have favored athletes of late, winning them not just millions in compensation but the ability to play immediately after transferring rather than have to sit out a year as once was the case. They can also discuss specific NIL compensation with schools and boosters before enrolling and current court battles include players seeking to play longer without lower-college seasons counting against their eligibility and ability to land NIL money while doing it.
Ehrlich compared the situation to the labor upheaval professional leagues went through before finally settling on collective bargaining, which has been looked at as a potential solution by some in college sports over the past year. Athletes.org, a players association for college athletes, recently offered a 38-page proposal of what a labor deal could look like.
“I think NCAA is concerned, and rightfully so, that anything they try to do to tamp down this on their end is going to get shut down,” Ehrlich said. “Which is why really the only two solutions at this point are an act of Congress, which feels like an act of God at this point, or potentially collective bargaining, which has its own major, major challenges and roadblocks.”
The NCAA has been lobbying for years for limited antitrust protection to keep some kind of control over the new landscape — and to avoid more crippling lawsuits — but bills have gone nowhere in Congress.
Collective bargaining is complicated and universities have long balked at the idea that their athletes are employees in some way. Schools would become responsible for paying wages, benefits, and workers’ compensation. And while private institutions fall under the National Labor Relations Board, public universities must follow labor laws that vary from state to state; virtually every state in the South has “right to work” laws that present challenges for unions.
Ehrlich noted the short careers for college athletes and wondered whether a union for collective bargaining is even possible.
To sports attorney Mit Winter, employment contracts may be the simplest solution.
“This isn’t something that’s novel to college sports,” said Winter, a former college basketball player who is now a sports attorney with Kennyhertz Perry. “Employment contracts are a huge part of college sports, it’s just novel for the athletes.”
Employment contracts for players could be written like those for coaches, he suggested, which would offer buyouts and prevent players from using the portal as a revolving door.
“The contracts that schools are entering into with athletes now, they can be enforced, but they cannot keep an athlete out of school because they’re not signing employment contracts where the school is getting the right to have the athlete play football for their school or basketball or whatever sport it is,” Winter said. “They’re just acquiring the right to be able to use the athlete’s NIL rights in various ways. So, a NIL agreement is not going to stop an athlete from transferring or going to play whatever sport it is that he or she plays at another school.”
There are challenges here, too, of course: Should all college athletes be treated as employees or just those in revenue-producing sports? Can all injured athletes seek workers' compensation and insurance protection? Could states start taxing athlete NIL earnings?
Winter noted a pending federal case against the NCAA could allow for athletes to be treated as employees more than they currently are.
“What’s going on in college athletics now is trying to create this new novel system where the athletes are basically treated like employees, look like employees, but we don’t want to call them employees,” Winter said. “We want to call them something else and say they’re not being paid for athletic services. They’re being paid for use of their NIL. So, then it creates new legal issues that have to be hashed out and addressed, which results in a bumpy and chaotic system when you’re trying to kind of create it from scratch.”
He said employment contracts would allow for uniform rules, including how many schools an athlete can go to or if the athlete can go to another school when the deal is up. That could also lead to the need for collective bargaining.
“If the goal is to keep someone at a school for a certain defined period of time, it’s got to be employment contracts,” Winter said.
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Mississippi quarterback Trinidad Chambliss (6) runs the ball during the second half of the Fiesta Bowl NCAA college football playoff semifinal game against Miami, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026, in Glendale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri)
