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CDRD Undertakes Major Reorganization to Align With Key Functions and Optimize Its Role as 'Canada’s Life Sciences Venture'
Wednesday, November 7, 2018Company Profile | Follow Company
Vancouver, BC, November 7, 2018--(T-Net)--CDRD announced this week a major operational re-organization designed to align CDRD's structure with its three key functions, and optimize its role as Canada's life sciences venture by:
Effective immediately, all CDRD projects will be managed by one of three Venture Partners:
Dr. Lana Janes joined CDRD as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence earlier this year, and now joins full time as Venture Partner. Lana brings an impressive track record of over two decades of success in both business and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry, most recently serving as Senior Vice President at QLT (now Novelion), overseeing all aspect's of QLT's clinical stage R&D programs. Lana holds an AB in Chemistry from Harvard University, and did her PhD and postdoctoral work in organic chemistry at McGill University.
Dr. Jason Crawford has been CDRD's VP of Scientific Operations since 2014, and is now a Venture Partner. Like each of our Venture Partners, Jason is among the small cadre of people in Canada who has taken a drug from concept to marketplace. Jason holds a BSc in Chemistry/Biochemistry and a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Victoria.
Mr. Paul Drohan is also joining CDRD immediately as Venture Partner. Paul has over 25 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, including eight years in the United Kingdom with Genzyme (a Sanofi Company) as Senior Global Vice President, leading the organizations' strategic, financial, and sales and marketing operations performance for the UK, Republic of Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Paul is also CEO of drug development company, Zomanex (which he will continue to lead from his Venture Partner role at CDRD), and is the former President and CEO of LifeSciences BC.
Each Venture Partner is responsible for overseeing and advancing a portfolio of ongoing CDRD projects, and will be supported by their own multi-disciplinary scientific and business team with access to CDRD's state-of-the-art infrastructure.
Each of these portfolios is dominated by a major project that CDRD will seek to turn into a major spin-off, complemented by several other developing assets or relationships with mid-sized Canadian biotechs and academic researchers. In keeping with CDRD's mandate to train the next generation of scientific and business talent, each team will also include a number of members of the CDRD Academy's Post-Graduate and Undergraduate Institutes.
To complement and support the Venture Partner teams, responsibility for evaluating new projects, and for CDRD's Foresighting process to ensure an ongoing robust and strategic pipeline will continue to be led by Dr. Rachael Ritchie, Vice President, Partnerships & Strategy.
Venture Partner Teams will continue to be supported by Intellectual Property (led by Dr. Dave Rogers, VP), Finance and Operations (led by Matthew Carlyle, CFO), People and Strategy (led by Patricia York, VP), and Communications and External Affairs (led by Barry Gee, Senior Director) groups. Sacha Mann will also continue on as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence working with CDRD leadership to identify and capitalize on specific areas of strategic commercial opportunity.
Because of this process, CDRD reported that a number of colleagues have left their team.
About CDRD
CDRD is Canada's national life sciences venture, powering the country's life sciences industry by creating and growing companies of scale - and training the scientific and business talent needed to drive them to become leading global anchors in Canada. We build collaborations with the very best partners from academia, industry, patient foundations, the investment community, and other Key Opinion Leaders to provide the specialized expertise and infrastructure to identify, validate and advance promising discoveries, and transform them into commercially viable investment opportunities for the private sector — and ultimately into new therapies for patients.
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