Chief Science Officer

During the course of a 35+ year career in pharma/biotech, I had the opportunity to engage, guide, and lead efforts in the design and development of drugs. I was a Distinguished Research Fellow (<1% of scientific staff) at Abbvie and had been through the executive leadership program (<2% of corporate leaders). More importantly, I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to successful therapies including ritonavir, lopinavir, upadacitinib (RinvoqTM), and MavyretTM among them. I’ve created novel synthetic methodologies for both discovery and development of therapeutics as well as overall processes to clinical therapeutics. As examples, I led teams that successfully discovered and developed process routes including to ritonavir, lopinavir, and delafloxacin. I led teams and individually contributed to developing methodologies and created a catalysis group at Abbvie that designed novel catalysts now globally applied in the chemistry community. In the early 2000s, I lead the interface between drug discovery and development in Abbott/Abbvie which required a broad view of the pharmacology, biology, toxicology, and DMPK-BA aspects of drug development and in the late 2010s a biologics group that enabled multiple clinical candidates to reach the clinic. From 2018 to mid-2023 I led Abbvie’s Emerging Therapeutic Platform organization dedicated to accelerating learnings from a multi-dimensional perspective in novel modalities such as antibody-drug conjugates, gene therapies, bispecifics, targeted degradation, and targeted delivery. After leaving Abbvie, I contributed to bringing SPX-303 to the clinic for colorectal cancer through supporting IND enabling studies including CMC as well as preparation and submission of the IND, clinical protocol, and investigator’s brochure and doing site activation studies to achieve concept to first patient in less than 18 months. I am currently a part-time employee of Artisan Biopharma, the for-profit arm of cc-TDI as the chief scientific officer, an adjunct faculty member at cc-TDI, an advisor with the Adult Polyglucosan Body Disease Foundation, and a consultant in the small molecule and biologics space from strategy to execution.