San Rafael, California, United States
James is the Chief Business Officer and EVP at BioMarin. Prior to this he was the Global Head of Pharma Partnering and a member of the Corporate Executive Committee at Roche after being Senior Vice President of Genentech Partnering. Prior to this, he was President and CEO of Arete Therapeutics as well as Chairman of the Board of Directors and former CEO of Cytokinetics, a company he co-founded in August 1997. He currently sits on Cytokinetics' scientific advisory board. Prior to Cytokinetics, he held faculty positions at the University of California, San Francisco and Harvard Medical School. He served on the Board of Directors of HopeLab, a not-for-profit organization developing innovative technologies for the management of cancer, obesity and other diseases. He is a former member of Dean’s Council of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and served on the advisory board of the California Institute of Quantitative Biosciences. He received an M.D. from Queen’s University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco. His continued interests are in identifying,completing and managing drug discovery and development alliances that focus on novel targets and approaches to managing serious medical illness. In particular, he is interested in approaches that take into consideration the complexity and variation inherent in the human biological processes and putting the drug discovery process in an evolutionary context.