General Managing Partner
Park BioVentures, USA

Dr Alain Vertès is a Sloan Fellow from London Business School and a microbiologist by training (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Institut Pasteur Paris, and University of Lille Flandres-Artois). Dr. Vertès is a strategy and business development consultant for several companies, including cell therapeutic biotechs, and works to enable seed funding in the field. Focusing on technology deployment and innovation commercialization, he has contributed to both white (industrial) and red (pharmaceutical) biotechnology, in different functions including research, manufacturing, contract research, and strategic alliances in pharmaceuticals (Lilly, Pfizer, Roche), petrochemicals (Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation), public research, and consulting. Particularly, he has long been associated with the Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth in Kyoto, Japan, working on developing transformational biorefinery technologies and on deploying green technologies to the marketplace. In the pharmaceutical industry, he was for example global alliance director at Roche in the partnering group identifying strategic needs, finding, implementing and managing partnerships from licensing to mergers and acquisitions. Notably, he championed radical innovation for bringing to patients disease-modifying, paradigm-changing therapeutics such as siRNA, and led in a scientific and business manner Roche’s global cell therapeutics strategy and implementation team resulting in Roche’s entry in 2010 in the field of regenerative medicine.