Biotech Veteran Pushes New Science And Regulatory Change

By Ben Comer, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader

Jeff Cleland has been around the biotech block. After beginning his career in drug development with Genentech in 1991, he moved to increasingly senior level positions in R&D and manufacturing across a handful of companies, worked as a consultant, and then in 2009 became cofounder and CEO of Versartis, Inc. (Versartis merged with Aravive Biologics to create Aravive Inc. in 2018.) The experience of starting up Versartis from scratch — “a blank sheet of paper, and the opportunity to build everything up from there,” as Cleland describes it — made the decision to cofound and lead Ashvattha Therapeutics in the fall of 2019 an easy one.