Dr. Purnanand Sarma

Dr. Purnanand Sarma is the current Present for TiE Boston and the Consulting CEO for GelMEDIX. He has over 30 years of experience in building value across various segments of the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries.

He was most recently the President, CEO & Board member at Immunome (NASDAQ:IMNM). His experience in all aspects of pharmaceutical and biotechnology business gives him perspective to consider companies of various sizes, ranging from venture-backed biotechnology start-ups to large cap pharmaceutical companies.

In addition to conceiving and developing drugs that are commercially sold or in clinical development, Dr. Sarma also transacted several multi-hundred million products/assets focused on areas of high clinical need, such as cystic fibrosis, interstitial cystitis and bladder cancer and raised over $300M in private and public equity markets, including non-dilutive capital and debt financing.

Prior to Immunome, Dr. Sarma served as the CEO and Board member of TARIS Biomedical for 10 years. He developed and sold its first product to Allergan (NYSE:AGN) in a deal worth $587M, and the remaining company was completely acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2019 . He has also served as the VP and General Manager of World-wide Drug Delivery Technologies for Cephalon Corporation (NYSE:CEPH) and spent nearly 10 years at Nektar Therapeutics (NASDAQ:NKTR) prior to that, working across inhalation, conjugation and multiple powder technology platforms.

Dr. Sarma started his career at SmithKline Beecham in King of Prussia, PA after obtaining his PhD in Pharmaceutics from the University of Minnesota and B. Pharm from Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, India. He has served on the boards of multiple biotech companies, including Vaxess Technologies and GreenFire Bio.