Jeffery Smith became director of the equity and venture capital operations at biopharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) in March 2021, having joined the firm from Roth Capital Partners, a private banking firm.
At Roth, Smith had been managing director with responsibility for healthcare investment banking. His role at BMS involves supporting the company’s efforts in partnering with the innovative and science and technologies at external businesses with BMS’s own capabilities and expertise.
Among BMS’s recent deals are a lead role on the $150m post-IPO equity round for Century Therapeutics, a developer of allogeneic living drugs created to offer treatment for cancer. The transaction, which was completed in early 2022, involves a research collaboration and licensing agreement between the two firms.
Century Therapeutics’ CEO Lalo Flores said: “Bristol Myers Squibb is an ideal partner for us because they bring extensive clinical development and scientific expertise in cell therapy that will increase the probability of technical success of these programs.
“Additionally, this collaboration will enable deployment of our next-generation iPSC platform to develop products targeting malignancies that are difficult for biotech companies to tackle on their own.”
BMS has also participated this year in the $175m series B round for Metagenomi, a specialist in genome editing systems, as well as in the $75m series A raise for Ceptur Therapeutics, a business which is developing targeted oligonucleotide therapeutics.
Smith holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Iowa as well as a PhD in cancer biology from the Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in New York.
