Head, West Coast Business Development and Licensing, Merck
Alex Szidon currently leads West Coast Business Development & Licensing for Merck (Merck is known as MSD outside of US and Canada). In that role, Alex and his team have augmented Merck’s pipeline of innovative medicines via collaborations with innovative companies developing new modalities for anti-infective therapy, technologies to better understand patient response to treatment and protein engineering platforms to increase precision of therapy. Prior to joining Merck in 2015, Alex led the Operational Alliances group at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Cambridge, MA and Emeryville, CA after initially supporting asset transactions for the New Indication Discovery Unit and technology platform transactions for the Translational Sciences group within Strategic Alliances. Alex came to Pharma with experience in biotech and enterprise creation via the founding of Zafgen (NSDQ:ZFGN), an early employee in DARA Biosciences (NSDQ:DARA) and with experience in technology transfer as a Director of Business Development in the Office of Technology Development at the Harvard Medical School. Alex obtained his PhD in biochemistry and cell biology from UCSF and early business training as an associate consultant within L.E.K.’s Life Sciences practice in Boston.