Biopharma leaders charting a path for the industry's LGBTQ+ community

Many individuals and groups, whom we’ve highlighted in the past, have made the biotech industry more welcoming for the LGBTQ+ community over the years.

So for our third annual feature on LGBTQ+ leaders in biopharma, I’d hoped to present even further leaps by honoring 15 individuals shaping the future of not only their community but also the biotechs, pharmaceutical companies and other organizations involved in making and bringing new medicines to patients.

But this year’s special report ended up one short.

In a sign of the unending threats to the LGBTQ+ community, one selected individual asked that we not include them, citing the current climate. The broader climate is quite obvious — the Human Rights Campaign issued its first-ever state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the US last year. But within the biopharma industry, it’s harder to get a pulse of the current environment for LGBTQ+ employees. For the biopharma veteran who asked not to be named on this year’s list for privacy and safety reasons, the lack of industry support has led them to back out of a Pride employee resource group at their company and tell colleagues that they’re considering leaving biopharma altogether.

We had an outpouring of nominations again this year, which means I could have easily selected a replacement.

That option didn’t feel right to me. The LGBTQ+ community is still under attack in many places and some of the world’s most influential people continue referring to this growing group in derogatory ways (not just once, either).

It’s no wonder some people don’t want to be featured in special reports like this. So I felt compelled to leave the 15th spot blank to symbolize the ways prejudice can erode progress on visibility, and the emptiness we as a community can feel because we’re left out of boardrooms, executive teams, and places where discussions about our own rights are decided.

Hopefully, you’ll still be inspired by the work that the remaining 14 individuals below are doing within the life sciences industry and outside of it. It’s a multifaceted group of people who are directly creating new treatments (including one who hopes to find a drug for Alzheimer’s, which his husband might one day get) or are involved in the broader biotech ecosystem that makes this fascinating industry turn on all cylinders every day.

If you want to hear more from some of this year’s honorees, please tune into our virtual event this Thursday, when we’ll have a one-on-one discussion, panel and a Q&A session. I hope to see you there! — Kyle LaHucik 

A computational biologist’s connections to Alzheimer’s, Mount Everest and a winery 

When Fah Sathirapongsasuti found out that his husband, Mio Sakata, had a genetic risk for Alzheimer’s, he felt compelled to take action.

The couple learned of Sakata’s risk for the memory-robbing disease by way of 23andMe, the popular genetic testing company where Sathirapongsasuti worked for about six years until 2019 — and where he also helped design Pride T-shirts and organize company participation in LGBTQ+ parades.

“Time is ticking in a way, so we were hoping to be able to find something,” Sathirapongsasuti said in an interview with Endpoints News. “I feel like if I work in the field and I don’t even try to do something about it, I would regret it.”

He co-founded a new biotech based on technology that he worked on while at Alloy Therapeutics’ 82VS venture studio, which he joined in 2021. Named OligoLogic, the young startup is creating oligonucleotides and siRNAs for CNS conditions, including Alzheimer’s, though that may not be the first indication the company tests in the clinic, Sathirapongsasuti said.

OligoLogic is in the process of applying to incubators and speaking with investors. As a first-time biotech founder, Sathirapongsasuti said he’s currently asking for advice, citing the venture capital adage, “If you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money.”

“We were told a few times that if we had come up with this idea in 2020, 2021, it would have been much easier to invest in,” Sathirapongsasuti said.

But he’s charging ahead with co-founders Torin Kovach and Ben Chih, who has helped start other biotechs like Restoration Bio and Aldebaran Therapeutics.

Sathirapongsasuti is used to a challenge. He’s been advised by former colleagues in another country to not reveal he’s married to a man, but that didn’t stop him from being open at work. He’s made it to base camp at Mount Everest, and he might go back. And he worked with multiple groups to analyze large datasets around sexual orientation, publishing a paper in 2019 dispelling the “gay gene” theory. The paper became quite popular — Sathirapongsasuti even once overheard strangers in a Madrid bar discussing the study. He told them he was involved, and they were impressed, he said.

Outside of biotech, he helps Sakata run a winery named Sunset Cellars.

“I treat winemaking like an experiment,” Sathirapongsasuti said. He’ll tinker with last season’s outputs or create entirely new recipes, like an orange wine.

His biggest experiment, though, will be searching for the Alzheimer’s treatment that his husband might one day need. — Kyle LaHucik

Biotech needs more than just ‘Michaels’

New York City was Magdalena Tyrpien’s goal.

Currently the chief business officer of Forge Biologics, a gene therapy manufacturing company, Tyrpien orchestrated the company’s $620 million sale to Ajinomoto Group in 2023. While Forge is headquartered in Ohio, Tyrpien resides in New York.

Growing up, she hadn’t set out to join the life sciences industry. She didn’t know exactly what career she wanted, but she knew she wanted to end up in New York.

In 1997, Tyrpien and her family immigrated from Poland to northern New Jersey, not far from the billowing metal spires of New York.

At Montclair State University, she was a pre-law student. Like other immigrant families, hers hoped that she would become a doctor or lawyer.

“Oh man, maybe there’s more,” she thought.

In 2011, with an introduction from a former co-worker at a restaurant, Tyrpien became a business analyst at a cancer center in New Jersey. There, one of the projects she worked on was an algorithm software that got spun out into a biotech company called COTA. It fascinated her.

“I started googling what biotech is,” she said. “That’s what got me the bug, to then go and ask, ‘Well, what can you do with this?’”

In 2014, Tyrpien landed at healthcare investor Windham Venture Partners — and it was in New York City. “I’ve been always looking over from New Jersey,” she recalled thinking. “I’m finally going to make it to the city.”

That’s when her biotech career took off. A year later, she joined cell and gene therapy developer Abeona Therapeutics, where she worked for four years. She then worked in business development at another gene therapy maker, PTC Therapeutics.

“For people that have nothing, you’re giving them something to hold on to,” she said.

Along the way, Tyrpien has emphasized building community — whether in biotech or outside of it.

“I have this great group of queer individuals that I’m learning from wholeheartedly, and from different areas. I think that’s what’s so beautiful about the queer network,” she said. “It’s not like we’re all just biotech and finance. I’m learning about art. I’m learning about design. I’m learning about history.”

She’s building that community at home, in her dream location of New York. As the NYC chapter lead for Breaking 7%, she helps connect women in venture capital and business development. She’s also involved in Queer Venture Capital, Women in Bio and OUTbio. Her primary goal in these organizations is to help boost representation in an industry that’s historically male and white.

She recalled a 2018 STAT article about how there were more men named Michael than female CEOs presenting at the JP Morgan conference that year. “That — to my core, to this day — is my Roman Empire,” she said.

Recently, Tyrpien and her wife Lin opened The Lyle Gallery in Manhattan, on the outer edge of Chinatown. They held their opening exhibit in May, showcasing metalwork from three queer female artists. “It’s not that we’re like, ‘Hey, we’re a gay gallery’ — no,” she said, adding that it’s “not the main point, but in spite of it.”

“You build your people, you build your mentors, you build your community. And then if you can give back in any way, you try to give back,” Tyrpien said. — Lei Lei Wu

A VC pushing for sponsors for scientists and startup founders who know CRISPR, not Beyoncé

Vasudev Bailey has taken a globetrotting path to his current home in the Bay Area. The 40-year-old venture capitalist grew up in India before coming to the US as an undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine, heading to Johns Hopkins afterwards to earn a PhD in biomedical engineering.

That life experience has deeply influenced his views on investing and building communities in TechBio (a term that his VC firm, ARTIS Ventures, trademarked). He’s led ARTIS’ investments in Tessera Therapeutics, Excision BioTherapeutics and others.

On the LGBTQ+ front, Bailey has served on the board of The Trevor Project and helped “soft launch” his own networking group of LGBTQ+ founders called Uncommon.

Endpoints’ Andrew Dunn talked to Bailey last month. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Dunn: How has your LGBTQ+ identity influenced your own career path?

Bailey: I was born and raised in Bangalore, India, and my dad passed away on the night of my 11th birthday. The idea of mortality and health was front and center to me, even as a young kid. It was a cardiovascular event, and when you think about what he had at age 43 or 44, that’s something which we easily could have prevented with good intervention.

At the end of it, my identity is not only shaped by the fact I’m LGBTQ+, but also by the fact that I’m an immigrant to the US as well. If I did not have a scholarship, I could not have come to America.

As much as we have done well in trying to find great mentors in the LGBTQ+ community, I didn’t have an LGBTQ+ sponsor. There is no one. Here’s the kid from India, an immigrant, and I couldn’t name three Beyoncé songs for you today, which is really bad. I’m probably getting kicked out of many rooms for just saying that.

I don’t know pop culture, but I do know scientists. I do know business people. Unfortunately, I don’t think there were enough sponsors in the room who could advocate and could understand who I was.

Dunn: How has that experience influenced your own work?

Bailey: Many years ago I joined AWIS, Association for Women in Science, because I felt when my dad passed away, my mom struggled as a woman in trying to run a business. I wanted to be that voice to be a sponsor to the women who did not have that voice.

Dunn: What do you want to achieve over your career, given it still feels like early days at ARTIS?

Bailey: I want to innovate and invest in everyday diseases that affect everyday people across the world. The true equalizer of impact is AI and technology. That is a filter for what we look at.

While the rest of the VC world has turned up and put up its nose toward things like infectious disease, I was an investor in Excision Bio, which is working on HIV.

Do you know how many VCs and people in healthcare said, ‘Vas, HIV, you can live with HIV forever.’ None of these people have ever met a gay person who has HIV who’s taking a drug for the rest of their life.

Is it more challenging to take this path? Yeah, because it goes away from the crowd-thinking. But I’ve always been different. I’ve always been the immigrant, the gay guy, the person who is not coming from a family line and lineage of wealth. I’ve always been that outlier, so why not be an outlier in how we think about where we want to build companies?

Moving away from the ‘monochrome’

From diversity stickers on her computer to taking bias out of the recruitment process, Dawn Thompson said she makes it her mission to foster an open working environment.

“It always seems like one step forward and one step back, so it’s always important to be visible at work and create a safe space for people to feel like they can be their authentic selves,” Thompson, SVP and head of platform development at Empress Therapeutics, said in an interview with Endpoints.

Thompson started her career in evolutionary biology, but quickly changed track once she realized genomics was the direction biology was turning. This is where she faced a dilemma — picking between places such as the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA, and other laboratory positions in California. What swayed her mind? The Broad Institute’s diversity program.

It was the “tiebreaker” for Thompson, who was drawn to the Broad’s “strong commitment” to diversity. She then worked at the Broad for nine years as a genomic researcher, group leader and director, all while participating as a mentor and appearing on the selection committee for the diversity initiative.

The Broad Institute diversity program promoted education in STEM subjects and held events throughout the year to mentor applicants to get to graduate school and then obtain a research position. There were both internship and graduate opportunities, Thompson said.

Thompson was actively involved in STEM conferences that serve underrepresented people and promote education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“Diversity is important because it leads to innovation and creativity. It’s important for all walks of life — especially at work,” she said.

Thompson worked at the Broad for nine years before a stint at Ginkgo Bioworks as the head of next generation sequencing. She then served as chief scientific officer of Directed Genomics for a brief period before four years at fungi-informed LifeMine Therapeutics.

Now in her role at Flagship-founded Empress, Thompson heads up a 28-person team to help develop tech, like automated and robotic platforms, for drug discovery.

Yet Thompson still makes it her mission to continue advocating for diversity initiatives. She regularly encourages company lunch and learns about unconscious bias and better hiring practices.

Creating an open environment takes action, both from the bottom up from employees and the top down from the leaders of a company, she said. “I think it has to go through the whole employee lifecycle, it has to go from recruitment, but also retention,” she added.

If a person of color or a gender non-confirming candidate sees what Thompson described as a “monochrome” interview panel, it subconsciously promotes bias.

“Look at your list,” she said, “and really think carefully: Am I being inclusive?” — Anna Brown

‘Not all skin-folk are kinfolk’ in LGBTQ+ biotech

On top of being the CEO of biotech accelerator Start Codon, Jason Mellad runs a pub with two friends in Cambridge, UK. He co-owns The Lab Cambridge – a “1920s cocktail bar with a twist of science” – with a general practitioner and a professor of epigenetics.

“We’ll say we’re three doctors getting people drunk,” Mellad jokes.

Within Cambridge’s “tight-knit community,” the pub hosts mixers among students, investors and people in biotech where they mingle and network.

“It’s down to those personal interactions. If you’re from outside of the ecosystem, it can seem quite daunting. But actually it is very welcoming here and we’re trying to bring in new blood all the time,” Mellad said.

Connecting people is in Mellad’s DNA. Start Codon, which he co-founded, describes itself as a venture builder and investor.

The team at Start Codon looks for healthcare innovators, which they then mentor on how to navigate biotech’s development, funding and strategic partnership frameworks. It invests at least £250,000 into its portfolio companies, according to its website.

So far, the accelerator has built 27 ventures. It has nurtured over 100 interns from an array of backgrounds, and some have even started their own companies or become VC investors themselves.

According to Mellad, there’s been a “gradual but accelerating change” in the presence of LGBTQ+ people in biotech. “There have been many of us who have been in positions of power but maybe it’s been silent,” Mellad said. “Now, we’re just more visible.”

But Mellad underscored that “not all skin-folk are kinfolk.” To address the needs of the LGBTQ+ community, it’s not just increasing diversity in key positions; they should have the best interest of the broader community at heart.

If an LGBTQ+ person is in a position of power, there can be cases in which they might become even “more heteronormative” and they could fear being “ostracized” by focusing too much on LGBTQ+ issues, Mellad said. And there are also allies who are genuine proponents of LGBTQ+ issues, he added.

“It needs to be people who have the right mindset and the right motivations,” Mellad said. “If you’re seeking to be doing something out of personal self-interest or out of optics, that’s when you fail.”

Mellad grew up in Louisiana, with roots in Jamaica and Panama. “I’m one of the few Black fund managers in the biotech space, full stop,” he said.

And it is important to Mellad that all of his passions intersect.

“If I’m in one context, I mention the other. So if I’m at an event talking about being Black in biotech, I make sure I mention the other things I am passionate about,” Mellad said. “I did have some pressure early on to kind of pick a lane. I can’t do that. I don’t think in lanes.” — Reynald Castañeda

Susan Acker-Walsh on being a ‘community contributor,’ and never giving up

Susan Acker-Walsh is restless.

She’s marched for LGBTQ+ rights, including in the 1993 March on Washington, one of the largest rallies in US history. She married her wife twice, once in a civil ceremony and again when gay marriage was legalized in their home state of North Carolina. She also fought for parental rights to their son twice after a lawsuit stripped the rights of same-sex parents in her state. She isn’t done fighting yet.

“I feel like I’m here for a reason, to do things that make it better. And I hope I use every measure of my ability to do that every single day,” she told Endpoints. 

Acker-Walsh carries that mantra in her role as CEO and co-founder of Creo, a management consulting firm that works with a broad spectrum of life science and health companies, from discovery-stage biotechs to commercial-stage drugmakers and more. She founded the company in 2015, after holding executive leadership roles in healthcare, including chief operating officer at SciMetrika, a population health research organization.

While she declined to go into detail about Creo’s clients, Acker-Walsh said the team is at its best meeting companies “in moments of transition or transformation.” She describes Creo’s work as the “wraparound love and support services” that help companies strategize and grow. Creo helps companies plan for a variety of changes, from raising capital to developing leaders to integrating acquisitions, among other services. It’s named after the Latin word “creo,” meaning to create and the Spanish phrase “yo creo,” or “I believe.”

Acker-Walsh noted that she has “always felt like I could be myself in this industry and not have to hide.”

But it hasn’t always been easy. Much has changed since she came out almost 40 years ago. She recalls getting spit at while marching in a Pride parade in Durham, NC, in the 1990s. Looking back, it feels as though she spent much of her 20s, 30s and even 40s fighting, she said.

Years later, she attended the same Pride parade, where she worked a booth scoping out potential job candidates for SRA International, a company that supported federal government agencies, as leader of their inclusion counsel. It’s those “bright moments” of progress that motivate her. She has now been married to her wife for 20 years, and her son — whom she successfully re-adopted at 8 years old — is now graduating high school.

“I want to be a community contributor. I want to be a daughter, and a sister, and a friend and niece, and the best version of who I can be. And I want to be a contributor to my field,” she said. “I want the world to be better than I found it.” — Nicole DeFeudis

With pharma advocacy in ‘very poor’ shape, Jon Williams aims to foster inclusivity

Jon Williams has always understood the importance of how one’s surroundings can impact their direction in life — regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Williams was raised by a Mormon father and Jewish mother, and attended the notoriously LGBTQ-unfriendly Brigham Young University, giving him exposure to different perspectives and worldviews from a young age. It allowed him to appreciate where other people were coming from, even if he didn’t agree with them, he said.

And seeing the pain of closeted LGBTQ+ people from a young age, while also having to hide his own self, impacted how much emphasis he puts on creating accepting environments at the companies he’s run, Williams said in an interview with Endpoints.

“I constantly heard about people who committed suicide and I wondered, you know, ‘Will that ultimately be me?’” Williams said. “I looked around at BYU, and I knew of kids who committed suicide, who were closeted and gay. And it was sad, it was awful.”

Creating environments where everyone feels accepted is something Williams says he’s strived to do at both companies he’s founded — first at the CRO Evidera, which he sold to PPD in 2016, and now at Lumanity, which he launched in 2018 and aims to improve patient access by streamlining commercialization processes and efficiency. At both companies, Williams said, he hired people who shared his values, particularly in leadership roles.

He applied the same principles to the companies Lumanity acquired as it grew, a number that so far totals nine. “That was an immutable criteria for us,” he said. Williams said he prefers the acquisition route, because it would have taken too long to build a company from the ground up.

Part of the reason Williams insists on upholding these values is to ensure the next generation of LGBTQ+ people working in biopharma has role models. He didn’t know of a single LGBTQ+ person at the Boston-area consulting firm Monitor Group when he started working in the 1990s.

Monitor Group was open-minded for the time, Williams said, but it wasn’t until he went to business school and joined an LGBTQ+ community that he found a network.

Finding that network “was extremely helpful for me, because it allowed me to establish relationships with other people that were like me,” he said. “But it also allowed me to see people that were in more advanced stages of their career and say, ‘I can be like that individual, I can be openly out, I can talk about my then-boyfriend, now-husband, without retribution.’”

The pharma industry, in his opinion, has done a “very poor job” advocating for LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion, as evidenced by the lack of gay executives. There are exceptions, he said, and LGBTQ+ people in the C-suite in other industries have helped move things forward, like Apple’s Tim Cook.

“Every young person needs to be able to look at somebody else and say, ‘I see myself in that person, and that person is successful, and I want to be like that person,’” Williams said. “And that’s true of all groups.” — Max Gelman

Honoring early patient advocates and guiding the next generation

When Travere Therapeutics received an accelerated approval for a rare kidney disease treatment in February 2023, the biotech’s CEO couldn’t help but think of the outspoken people during the AIDS epidemic who developed the blueprint for patient advocacy and the accelerated approval pathway.

Eric Dube, Travere’s CEO, had come out at age 18 during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when it was “ravaging our community,” he said.

“I had a very personal reflection of who we owe this to and the so many men that lost their lives, but whose legacy has helped so many others save theirs,” Dube said, reflecting on the green light for the drug, called Filspari. “That is probably the most personal milestone.”

He’s heard stories of LGBTQ+ individuals who have rare kidney diseases and the struggles they can face “in feeling comfortable talking about their journeys.”

“It’s a reminder that even though I can live as an openly gay man — and as an executive and a CEO, [something] that I never thought I’d be able to do in my life, I’m humbled — but there’s still a lot more work to be done,” he said.

Travere, which awaits a full approval decision in IgA nephropathy from the FDA, is also speaking with communities of color, people who reside in rural areas, patients who speak English as a second language and other underrepresented groups in healthcare about how to reach them and how to improve healthcare access, Dube said.

Dube said it’s important to stop and listen to what patients need to access healthcare.

“That to me is what an ally is: is don’t take your perspective and apply that to a clinical trial design, or patient services or education, but to listen and be humble,” Dube said.

Outside of work, he’s also involved with the San Diego chapter of OUTbio, an organization that hosts events, mentoring programs and other resources for the LGBTQ+ life sciences community. He helped form the local unit after a successful event at the annual BIO convention when it was hosted in Travere’s hometown of San Diego in 2022. People have approached him about forming their own chapters in other cities and countries, he said.

“People [are] taking it on and running with it and not feeling like, ‘Well, I need to ask my CEO,’” Dube said. “There is a real sense of ownership and momentum here that really is so inspiring. I wish that when I started my career 25, 30 years ago, that there was something like this.”

San Diego, and the broader biotech industry, is still conservative around LGBTQ+ issues, he believes.

“While in many ways we advance health and health equity as an industry, people are still looking for a sense of connection with others in the LGBTQ community as well as allies,” Dube said.

About four years before that accelerated approval for Filspari, during his first town hall as Travere CEO, Dube introduced himself to his colleagues and shared with everyone that he was gay and a cancer survivor. He wanted to create that connection with employees.

“I do remember that very vividly, and the warmth of that welcome was just palpable. I felt very excited and I felt like I was home in many ways,” he said. — Kyle LaHucik

Now a manufacturing exec, Atkinson is the out leader he didn’t see growing up

Morrey Atkinson was working out at the Stanford gym when he first heard a US president say the words “gay” and “lesbian” on television just over 30 years ago. It was a simple and overdue gesture that came at a key moment in the biology graduate student’s budding role in advocating for LGBTQ+ rights.

“There was just this fight for just basic rights and recognition, and fighting against a lot of anti-gay sentiment and legislation,” he said.

Today, Atkinson fights lingering, and in some cases, growing, discrimination on top of his day job as a senior executive at Vertex Pharmaceuticals responsible for making the company’s cystic fibrosis pills and its recently approved CRISPR cell therapy for sickle cell disease. He previously held top biologics manufacturing roles at Eli Lilly and Bristol Myers Squibb, where he helped lead the acquisition and integration of Celgene and its CAR-T cell therapy programs.

Atkinson came out as gay soon after high school, but his activism was forged during the HIV and AIDS crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when he was at Stanford. Scientists were still learning the immunology of the disease in parallel with trying to understand the virus, and Atkinson found himself using his training to translate that research to help his friends and community make sense of it all.

“It was a tough time. I lost a lot of friends. We went to a lot of funerals,” he said. “But anything I could do to translate what I understood about biology into helping people kind of cope, I did.”

While at Stanford, Atkinson also worked on the Human Rights Campaign and political campaigns for San Francisco city supervisor Cleve Jones and former Sen. Dianne Feinstein. But for many years, he kept his professional and political lives separate. A brief stint at a company that refused to offer healthcare for his partner – he declined to name the employer – and a more positive experience with the Pride employee group at BMS, helped change that.

“I started saying I need to be comfortable being gay at work, but also doing more at work in order to help the LGBT community,” Atkinson said.

At Vertex, he’s worked with the company’s Pride employee resource network, or ERN, to provide inclusive benefits and support to the company’s LGBTQ+ employees. The group runs a “reverse mentoring” program, where two members of the Pride ERN meet with and mentor senior leaders at the company, giving them a chance to learn about, and ask questions about, topics like allyship and gender identity.

“It’s a really safe space to talk about some things that can be uncomfortable, or that you wouldn’t normally talk about at work,” Atkinson said.

Those conversations are as important as ever with the worrying rise of anti-LGBT legislation across the country — something that Atkinson helps fight while serving on the national leadership council at the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, an organization that does pro bono work on important legal cases involving LGBTQ+ rights.

“If I would have seen gay or lesbian senior leaders when I was younger, that would have made a tremendous impression on me. I knew of senior leaders who were closeted in my companies, who we knew were gay, but they weren’t out at work. And that makes it almost seem like it’s not okay,” Atkinson said.

“Representation is really important,” he added. “One of the reasons I’m more open and out is that it’s important for people to see people who are comfortable and safe.” — Ryan Cross

A Merck leader’s ‘continuous agenda’ to push for diversity, not ‘hundreds of me’s’

It wasn’t until two years into his role at Merck that Björn Oddens came out to his colleagues.

But his co-workers quickly became a key part of his life, and when Oddens married his husband, he had Merck colleagues at his wedding.

“That taught me, OK, so how can I help other people in similar situations to bring themselves to work and not hide it for the two years, as I did?” Oddens said in an interview with Endpoints.

Now, he hopes to help colleagues “bring themselves to work” as part of Merck’s global DE&I council and in his role as senior VP of medical affairs and outcomes research at Merck Research Laboratories, overseeing 2,700 employees around the world. He’s working toward better diversity across the workforce, advisory boards and clinical trials.

He became part of Merck in 2009 after the Schering-Plough merger. And through the last several decades of leading his team, which is involved in aspects of drug development including providing key input for clinical trials, increasing diversity has meant working with Merck’s HR department to develop inclusive interview guides and make sure the slates of prospective candidates are diverse as well as talking openly about biases. Otherwise, Oddens said, you could end up hiring a “copy of yourself without even realizing it.”

“I always say to my organization, if you have hundreds of me’s, then you would be very unhappy and I would not be successful,” Oddens added. “We need to have people who are very different and will bring different perspectives to the table, because that makes us all more successful.”

Oddens is also still actively working in areas of need, including biases around HPV and HIV vaccines, and increasing representation in Merck’s cancer trials, adding that the drugmaker wants to dedicate a Phase 3 trial solely for women in South Africa for the company’s PrEP program, which is scheduled to start after completion of Merck’s Phase 2 PrEP program in mid-2025.

Merck’s patient profiles in vaccine trials match the US population in terms of race and sexual orientation, he said, but oncology still needs more work. Underserved communities are still underrepresented in trials because of a bias to have sites focused on major cancer centers like Dana-Farber in Boston and MD Anderson in Houston, he said.

“Using data analytics, where are those patients? They are at the community oncology centers,” Oddens said, adding that Merck has “a lot of discussions” with ASCO and other associations about “how we can bring the trials to these sites where these underrepresented patients are. Because we’re not happy that our representation doesn’t reflect the US population.”

Oddens is also working on other biases in the medical field, including that its HPV vaccine, Gardasil, “is for girls.” He is heading to Japan in July to push for getting a male indication for Gardasil.

“We did a lot of work communicating and getting the approvals, but we are still doing that work so that boys will be vaccinated as well,” Oddens said. “We’ve been successful here in the United States, but not in every country around the world, so that’s a continuous agenda that we have.” — Katherine Lewin

It’s not always about big changes, but personal ones

Hayley Parker told a trusted friend she was gay when she first entered the industry in her 20s at the turn of the millennium.

Then her colleagues stopped talking to her.

“I’m a firm believer that if you’re comfortable at work, if you could be your true self at work, you can do your best work. People know when you’re hiding something and naturally then don’t trust you,” she said. “But that was the thing. I wouldn’t talk about my weekend because it’s very difficult. I had a partner to bend every sentence around to avoid a pronoun.”

It took the Brit a transatlantic move to the US to feel more at ease as she grew more involved with Pride initiatives.

Today, Parker is taking what she’s learned from over a decade in the States to Massachusetts-based biotech PepGen, which works on oligonucleotide therapies. She’s been building her own team as PepGen’s head of regulatory affairs after joining last year.

It’s not the only thing she’s building. Parker has been promoting a more inclusive environment both internally and externally through PepGen’s employee resource network, as well as pitching and representing the company at LGBTQ+ job fairs.

“They’re very basic, it’s small baby steps, but that’s how it starts,” Parker said. “And if we can do it at the foundation level at the beginning of a company, because we are still relatively young as a company, then it becomes part of the company culture.”

After all, organizations are made from people. It’s not always about big changes at the organizational level, Parker said. Sometimes, it’s the small details.

“It’s like when you smile at somebody in the morning, and they go away going, ‘Oh, I feel a bit better now.’ And then they smile at somebody else,” she said. “I think it’s a little bit like that to me.”

It’s something she learned through a reverse mentorship program at Vertex, where she headed their regulatory affairs and stayed for almost six years until 2022. There, Parker and her colleagues from the Pride group would meet with senior leaders of the company and explain what it’s like to be LGBTQ+ in the workplace.

“I’m very, very fortunate that in my stage of life, now I’m able to be out at work. I’m able to just be me. Isn’t that amazing?” she added. “When I was in my early 20s, I would never have thought that would be possible.” — Ngai Yeung

A journey to helming a research team at BMS and bringing others along the way

Francisco Ramírez-Valle had two concrete ideas about himself from a young age.

“One is that I wanted to be a scientist. And two is that I was gay,” he said.

Ramírez-Valle, who hails from Mexico, said in his community, it wasn’t accepted to be gay, and in high school he moved to join his relatives in the United States.

Several supportive teachers encouraged him to apply for internships and scholarships, and he eventually landed at the University of Rochester, where he received a bachelor’s in microbiology.

At first, he envisioned himself as strictly a scientist, spending his days poring over research in an academic lab. That changed early in college when he interned in the dermatology department at a University of Rochester hospital.

Working with a principal investigator, Ramírez-Valle collected samples from actual patients and conducted studies on them in the lab. He said he learned through that experience that science doesn’t have to happen slowly in ivory towers, but it can be applied in real time to understand human health.

“That really changed my perspective on what a scientist could be,” he said.

Ramírez-Valle went on to receive both his MD and PhD from New York University and completed his residency in dermatology at the University of California, San Francisco, where he conducted postdoctoral research in immunology.

Now, he heads up a 170-person team at Bristol Myers Squibb spanning across the country that is focused on discovery and translation work in immunology and cardiovascular diseases.

The promise of new medicines drew him to biopharma, he said. It was more enticing to him than publishing academic papers and giving presentations.

While LGBTQ+ inclusion has improved over the years since he entered the medical field, there’s still a way to go to improve representation at the leadership level, Ramírez-Valle reflected. He said as a gay Latino man he still doesn’t always see himself represented in boardrooms and leadership positions.

As an executive sponsor of Bristol Myers’ diversity inclusion council in research and development, Ramírez-Valle aims to get more representation in clinical trials, particularly in the LGBTQ+ population. He said BMS has started collecting data on sexual orientation and gender identity from clinical trial participants, which is often overlooked in research.

In addition to bringing new drugs to market, Ramírez-Valle said he wants to ensure other gay and Latino scientists have the support they need to become a leader in the field.

“If I can be a mentor to anyone, whether they’re a Latino kid, whether they’re from a poor background or from a sexual minority, that they can achieve everything that they want and become a leader if that’s what they want, that would be amazing,” he said. — Lia DeGroot

The nuances of inclusion — from large pharma to biotech

Nathan Higginson-Scott recalls an interview candidate at Pandion Therapeutics who came into the office and saw a photo of his husband on his desk. The candidate, who happened to be gay, later said what they saw made them feel Pandion would be a great place to work.

“It’s really important for a company to role-model, and especially to have senior leaders role-model, that sort of inclusion,” Higginson-Scott said.

He was head of biotherapeutics at Pandion from 2017 to 2021. There, he put together a research team that developed an early-stage autoimmune pipeline later bought by Merck in a $1.85 billion acquisition.

“I really enjoyed that small company culture of wearing so many different hats and being able to have so much influence from a cultural perspective,” Higginson-Scott said. The experience marked a turning point for Higginson-Scott, who had worked at pharma giant Pfizer for much of his career until then.

When Pfizer acquired Wyeth in 2009, Higginson-Scott crossed the Atlantic from Sandwich, UK to his new base in the US. When he found there was no LGBTQ+ employee resource group at the former Wyeth site, he and some other volunteers created one. Over the next few years, membership exploded.

“If you feel like you’re the only LGBTQ+ person in the organization, you’re not going to feel like you belong, and that’s where the ERG piece is really important,” Higginson-Scott said.

But ERGs aren’t always an option, especially at smaller companies with fewer employees, where inclusion has to be promoted in other, more creative ways, he added.

And that’s exactly what Higginson-Scott is trying to do as chief technology officer at machine learning-driven biotech Seismic Therapeutic. The company, which was founded in 2020, is preparing to bring its two lead candidates into the clinic in the first half of 2025.

The first is a pan-IgG sculpting enzyme therapeutic for autoantibody-mediated diseases, and the second is a dual-cell bidirectional antibody drug targeting PD-1.

At smaller companies, “it becomes more about doing [inclusion] in a less centralized way,” through role modeling, representation and diversifying candidate pools, Higginson-Scott said. During Pride month, Seismic held a seminar on LGBTQ+ mental health hosted by The Trevor Project, where Higginson-Scott also volunteers as a crisis counselor for LGBTQ+ youth. The biotech also held Pride trivia nights.

“There are lots of little things you can do that really add up and synergize to fostering inclusion,” he said.

Higginson-Scott plans to keep the inclusive culture alive at Seismic, which recently planted roots in permanent offices in Watertown, MA. Sitting on his shiny new desk is a photo of his husband, and another one of the couple on a trip together in California’s wine country. — Ayisha Sharma

Guiding 5,000 LGBTQ+ employees

In a multinational company of more than 130,000 employees, feeling a sense of connection isn’t always easy, especially in underrepresented groups like the LGBTQ+ community.

But Johnson & Johnson has more than 5,000 LGBTQ+ individuals and allies in its global group dedicated to the community, and it’s a personal role for its co-chair Scott Trzaskawka, who helps guide 104 chapters across multiple states and countries.

The 23-year J&J veteran had a mentor and ally tell him around 2005 to stop compartmentalizing his life and to just be himself at work. It was a defining moment in his career and a principle that he carries with him to this day, Trzaskawka said.

“I used to try to be a different person. Those in the community, we all have our own diverse journey of self-discovery and knowing and being comfortable with who we are,” Trzaskawka said. That interaction with his co-worker all those years ago is why he’s “passionate about diversity and inclusion and allyship.”

For about the past year, he’s been co-chair of J&J’s 30-year running LGBTQ+ employee group Open&Out, which conducts internal trainings, fosters employee participation in Pride parades, and partners with other organizations to gain insights into how to address healthcare disparities, among other programming.

In his day-to-day role, Trzaskawka is helping the healthcare giant transition from its former consumer health business Kenvue. His “gay job,” as he says, is heading up LGBTQ+ initiatives as co-chair of Open&Out. Outside of work, he’s either at home with his partner of 29 years and their border collie named Audrey, watching Broadway musicals, or spending time with his nieces and nephews.

The accountant initially got a feel for the healthcare industry during college, when he worked in the accounting department at a hospital. He began his career in consulting but would eventually move into the healthcare provider world in the mid-1990s, and then pharma toward the turn of the millennium.

Open&Out houses a program called O&O LABS, which stands for Leaders Advising Business Solutions. The program, described as an internal think tank, helps find ways for J&J to support LGBTQ+ health.

One of the biggest recent milestones for O&O was helping create a de-gendered and transgender-inclusive Phase 3 study in prostate cancer. Most prostate cancer clinical trials narrowly focus on men. But J&J wanted to design a study, dubbed LIBERTAS, that removed that gendered way of thinking and allowed researchers to gain a better understanding of the disparities that LGBTQ+ prostate cancer patients face.

The group has also worked on a 12-month transgender health cultural competency program for J&J employees, which Trzaskawka said brought together about 20 R&D business leaders for a four-day training and subsequent monthly learning activities that drove “cultural awareness of the [LGBTQ+] community.” — Kyle LaHucik