Category:Biotech pioneers
Biotechnology as a commercial sector runs on a small number of people who move repeatedly between the laboratory, the chief executive's office and the venture fund, and this roster is a clean sample of that pattern rather than a list of scientists. Two of its members ran the same company in succession. Two others hold the chief scientific officer's title at companies founded within the last two years. The rest sit somewhere between those poles, which is the ordinary shape of a career in this industry.
Running the large companies
George Scangos taught biology at Johns Hopkins and did research at Bayer before fourteen years running the genomics company Exelixis, then led Biogen from 2010 to 2016, where he built out the neurology pipeline in multiple sclerosis and early Alzheimer's research. Michel Vounatsos succeeded him at Biogen and ran the company from 2017 to 2022, a tenure defined by its pursuit and eventual approval of the Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm. Stéphane Bancel trained as an engineer in France before taking over Moderna, which produced one of the first authorized COVID-19 vaccines using messenger RNA. Ernesto Bertarelli inherited Serono on his father's death in 1998, ran it as one of the largest biotechnology companies in the world, and sold it in 2007.
Founders and financiers
Christoph Westphal holds both an MD and a PhD from Harvard Medical School and has spent his career creating companies rather than running one: he co-founded Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, which GlaxoSmithKline acquired in 2008, along with Genocea Biosciences, Verastem and Flex Pharma, and later ran GSK's venture arm. Zach Weinberg co-founded Curie.Bio, which raised more than half a billion dollars in 2023 to act, in his description, as a copilot for early scientific ideas rather than as a conventional drug developer.
The newest layer
The two most recent additions to this category are both chief scientific officers rather than chief executives, and both at very young companies. Jess Li co-founded Biocartesian, which converts biological information into digital molecular maps, out of San Francisco. Weronika Slesak co-founded Evolvere BioSciences in Oxford to develop antibiotics designed to stay ahead of bacterial evolution. Their presence changes what this category is for: it now spans the industry's incumbents and its seed stage in the same list.
See also
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