Jim is a life science industry leader with over 30 years of executive experience focused on the strategic development and commercialization of innovative therapies. He’s been board chair at Orchard Therapeutics, Pieris Pharma, and Juniper Pharma, and today is chair of OMass Therapeutics in Oxford. He is also a board member at Voyager and Fulcrum Therapeutics, which he co-founded as an EIR at Third Rock Ventures from 2013-16.
During over 20 formative years at Genzyme, Jim served as Senior VP of International Development, President of Genzyme Europe, and founding president and CEO of Genzyme Transgenics. He became Senior VP Strategy and Business Development at Sanofi upon its acquisition of Genzyme. After a brief stint as a lawyer Jim started his healthcare career in strategy consulting at Bain and Company.
He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.S. from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. from Georgetown. He’s the author of the critically-acclaimed Inside the Orphan Drug Revolution: The Promise of Patient-Centered Biotechnology (Cold Spring Harbor, #1 on Amazon 2022).
Jim has spent his career inside companies where the core question was: you can’t fund everything, so what do you build next?
At Genzyme, he held senior leadership roles as the company and became a global rare-disease biotech leader. After Sanofi acquired Genzyme, he moved into senior strategy and business development roles inside this major pharma organization.
Since then, as Chair and board member at companies like Orchard Tx, OMass Tx, Fulcrum Tx, Voyager Tx and Pieris Pharma he has stayed close to the decisions that define lean multi-asset strategy: which program earns the next investment, which one waits, and how a company stays focused without narrowing too early.
Jim captured the rare-disease playbook in his book Inside the Orphan Drug Revolution - a clear account of how biotech companies learned to build durable businesses by staying disciplined under constraint.
CEO Clinics are an intimate forum for confidential exchange on a given topic and therefore limited to 6-8 Members.
If you are interested in joining this Clinic, you must RSVP on the platform.
In the event that more than 8 people sign up, we will allocate places one week before the event.