Under Barbara Dalton, winner of the GCV Lifetime Achievement Award and senior managing partner at Pfizer Ventures, O’Donnell rapidly took on board observer or director roles, including at Morphic Therapeutic, Strata Oncology, Petra Pharma, BioAtla, Adapsyn Biosciences, Kymera Therapeutics, Arkuda Therapeutics and Storm Therapeutics.
O’Donnell joined the ventures team after working on synthetic drugs at Pfizer in mid-2018 as the parent gave its venturing unit another $600m to invest. Dalton expanded her team by bringing on Denis Patrick as managing partner and to pick up innovation partnering, Mike Baran as partner and Rana Al-Hallaq as principal and has managed an effective transition from her previous deputy, Elaine Jones, and integration of the new faces with the well-established Bill Burkoth and Nikola Trbovic.
Transition, more money but similar end results of focus on finding top entrepreneurs based on science and adding value to them and the corporate parent.
But continuity over change is a challenge few groups succeed at. For every Dalton as leader with decades of experience and consistent support there are other managers where the support is less consistent as the C-suite changes above them and priorities are reset.
