Jeanmarie Guenot

Jeanmarie Guenot, Ph.D. has over 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry. She has worked with all stages of companies, both public and private, in pharmaceutical R&D, corporate & commercial development, business development, project & alliance management and venture capital. She has significant expertise and interest in building or rebuilding companies and is currently the President & CEO of Amphivena Therapeutics, Inc., a company that is developing innovative bifunctional antibody therapies for hematologic malignancies. Prior to her current role, Dr. Guenot founded, built and ran SKS Ocular, a start-up ophthalmic company incubator, focused on dry AMD, sustained release ocular drug delivery technologies and therapeutics for glaucoma, macular degeneration and ocular inflammation. She was a business advisor for Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel and Shanghai, and she was Vice President of Corporate & Business Development at PDL BioPharma, where she led licensing, mergers and acquisitions and alliance management for PDL’s R&D and commercial product portfolios. She led and negotiated the Biogen Idec-PDL 50:50 co-development and co-commercialization strategic collaboration, which involved three Phase 2 cancer and autoimmune disease drug candidates. This $800 M transaction included a $100 M equity investment in PDL and a therapeutic candidate with indications split between Biogen Idec/PDL and Hoffmann-La Roche. She also licensed the ophthalmic indication for the oncology drug to Ophthotech. She has portfolio, project and alliance management experience in the areas of oncology, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases, neurology and ophthalmic diseases. Dr. Guenot started her business career at Atlas Venture, where she managed venture capital investments and built life science companies. She started her scientific career as a principal scientist in Preclinical R&D at Hoffmann-La Roche, discovering and developing drugs for metabolic diseases, inflammation, autoimmune diseases and oncology. Dr. Guenot trained in physical and medicinal chemistry, with a focus in quantum mechanical and semi-empirical methods for molecular dynamics, protein structure prediction, X-ray and NMR refinement and drug design. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco and her MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.