ON Partners Recruits Chief Commercial Officer for Vivodyne
December 14, 2022 – Andy Hickman and Alex Pelak of ON Partners recently assisted in the recruitment of Susan Billings as chief commercial officer of Philadelphia-based biotechnology company Vivodyne. “Dr. Billings brings an exceptionally rare combination of world-class experience in commercial strategy, strong character, and deep scientific expertise to Vivodyne,” said Andrei Georgescu, CEO. “I cannot overstate how thrilled we are to have her join our team and contribute so critically to our mission. Her leadership will dramatically accelerate our ability to keep pace with the strong market demand we are experiencing, while also fostering new co-development partnerships to develop the next generation of lifesaving medicines with world-leading pharmaceutical companies and biotherapeutics start-ups alike.”
Dr. Billings is an accomplished commercial leader in the global life science industry. She brings over a decade of experience in client-relationship growth and partnership, technology launch, commercial strategy, business transformation, and both building and scaling business development teams in a high-growth environment. Dr. Billings joins Vivodyne from a 11-year career at Curia (formerly AMRI), where she served as vice president and global head of business development and led Curia’s global business development teams for drug discovery, development, and manufacturing for biologics and small molecules, fine chemicals, and analytical and laboratory testing services. After earning her doctorate from UC Irvine in organic chemistry and before Curia, Dr. Billings advanced through technical and operational roles at an oncology start-up and then at Merck.
As chief commercial officer, Dr. Billings will be leading Vivodyne’s commercial and global business development strategy for bringing their disruptive platform to market. “I consider myself very fortunate to have joined such a mission-driven organization with a talent-rich team developing truly innovative technology at Vivodyne,” said Dr. Billings. “I am excited to further advance industry adoption of this new platform to help overcome the greatest bottleneck in drug development: lack of human clinical translation from preclinical animal data. Vivodyne’s technology has the potential to revolutionize how the industry approaches drug development because it provides lifelike human data before a clinical trial, and at incredible pace and scale.”
“The competitive advantage that Vivodyne brings to the market presents a trifecta for simultaneously navigating the complexity of human biology with unparalleled realism of our lab-grown human tissues, with unrivaled process automation, while generating consistent, feature-rich datasets for predictive AI,” Dr. Billings said. “Any life science company developing a therapeutic will strongly benefit.”
Vivodyne revolutionizes how scientists and the pharmaceutical industry study human biology and develop therapeutics. Vivodyne’s platform technology creates a new preclinical drug development pipeline for automated, high-throughput testing on functional lab-grown human organ tissues, while generating large datasets to power their predictive AI. The company was founded at the University of Pennsylvania by bioengineering PhD Andrei Georgescu and associate professor of bioengineering Dan Huh.
Leading Search Consultants
With a primary focus on technology, consumer, industrial, and the life science sectors, ON Partners recruits C-level and board talent for public and private companies, as well as venture capital and private equity firms. Founded in 2006, the firm’s consultants work from offices in Atlanta; Boston; Chicago; Cleveland; Dallas; Menlo Park, CA; Minneapolis. MN; San Francisco; and New York. ON Partners was named one of the fastest growing search firms this year by Hunt Scanlon Media. The firm is now ranked as one of the 20 largest search firms in the nation.
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Mr. Hickman has over 20 years of experience in executive search. He has placed 250-plus C-level executives in technology, information, innovation, security, engineering, and product roles. His primary focus is in private equity.
As a consultant, Mr. Pelak has a strong focus in technology, aerospace and defense, and industrial. His recent work includes senior-level placements for lidar, photonics, semiconductor, advanced materials, and consumer electronics clients.
Chief Commercial Officer Recruiting
The CCO is essentially responsible for the commercial strategy and the development of an organization. The role typically involves activities relating to marketing, sales, product development and customer service to drive business growth and market share. As a corporate officer, the CCO generally reports directly to the CEO and is charged with ensuring the integrated commercial success of an organization. The role typically combines technical knowledge of the relevant field with strong marketing and business development skills.
A CCO in large part takes ownership of the customer and the customer interface with the product or service offering, making sure that all functions of the organization are aligned to meet its strategic commercial objectives. This means that the role is closely linked to the organization’s strategic management function, in drafting, implementing, and evaluating cross-functional decisions that enable an organization to achieve its long-term objectives.
Related: ON Partners Assists Unison Software in Chief Technology Officer Search
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
