Medical school alumnus Greg Licholai, MD ‘95, MBA, will give the first talk in a new series sponsored by the Office of Development and Alumni Affairs that offers current students a view of potential career paths. His talk, "A Career in Biotech: Mistakes I've Made Along the Way," is the inaugural YSM Alumni Grand Rounds event on Wednesday, December 2, at 4:45 p.m. in the Beaumont Room, Sterling Hall of Medicine, 333 Cedar Street, New Haven.
Licholai has more than 25 years of experience in biotechnology leadership, in both consulting and entrepreneurial capacities. He is president of Elpidera LLC, the third venture company formed by Moderna Therapeutics of Cambridge, Mass., and Stockholm, Sweden. Elpidera—whose name is derived from the Greek word for hope—is focused on the discovery of new therapies for rare diseases, using Moderna’s proprietary messenger RNA technology. Its mRNA Therapeutics™ platform is described as “an entirely new, in vivo drug technology that produces human proteins, antibodies, and entirely novel protein constructs inside patient cells, which are in turn secreted or active intracellularly.”
Prior to Moderna, he was senior vice president for real-world and late-stage research at Quintiles and a partner-level consultant at McKinsey & Co., where he led a business line devoted to big data analytics for new drug launches. Licholai also has extensive experience as an executive at multiple biotechnology companies. He was chief operating officer of Proteostasis, a private biotechnology company, and earlier, was one of the first senior executives at rare disease biotech Amicus Therapeutics, helping put three products into human clinical trials for orphan indications and take the company public in 2007. He was also co-founder of Immunome, a biotech firm focused on a novel antibody platform.
Licholai received his MD degree from Yale School of Medicine in 1995 and his MBA from Harvard Business School. He trained in neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s, Children’s and Massachusetts General Hospitals, and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Scholar at the National Institutes of Health. He is currently on the scientific advisory boards of the National Tay Sachs and Allied Disease Foundation and the Partnership for Palliative Care. He is a member of the executive board of the Center for Biomedical and Interventional Technology at Yale. He lectures at the Harvard Innovations Lab and teaches the capstone healthcare MBA program at the Yale School of Management.
A light dinner will be served at 4:45 p.m. before the talk, which is open to the Yale community and the public. Space is limited. Please RSVP at http://tinyurl.com/alumnigrandrounds by November 25.