Gary D. Glick

Founder & CEO,
Odyssey Thera, Inc.

Gary D. Glick is founder and CEO of Odyssey Therapeutics and has over 25 years of experience in leading the discovery and development of therapies in biopharmaceutical companies and academic institutions. Glick started his career as a faculty member at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he is currently the Werner E. Bachmann emeritus professor of chemistry. In 2009, Glick founded and built Lycera Corp. to develop new therapies for inflammation and cancer based on small molecules that modulate cellular metabolism. After raising a $36M series A financing, and under his direction, Lycera initiated six discovery programs, partnered three of these programs with Merck & Co. in deals collectively valued at over $600M, and advanced two programs into clinical testing.

In 2015, Glick founded FirstWave Bio, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing new cost-effective treatments for inflammatory bowel disease, and IFM Therapeutics, Inc., to develop first-in-class modulators of the innate immune system as treatments for cancer and inflammatory diseases. Under his leadership as CEO, IFM progressed three programs from ideation to clinical development and executed three major transactions: in 2017, the company sold two cancer assets to Bristol-Myers Squibb in a deal valued over $2.3B and in 2019, he directed the sale of IFM’s NLRP3 inhibitor program to Novartis for $1.6B and led the structuring and negotiation of a collaboration and option agreement with Novartis valued at over $840M to develop inhibitors of the cGAS/STING pathway to treat serious inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. He currently serves as Executive Chairman. In 2020, Glick co-founded Scorpion Therapeutics. In under nine months he built the company’s pipeline, developed its business strategy, recruited a team of 50 employees and raised two rounds of financing totaling $270M.

Glick obtained a Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry from Columbia University and was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. He is the author of more than 100 papers, the inventor on 48 issued U.S. patents and the recipient of numerous awards recognizing his scientific contributions and accomplishments as a life science executive. He received the 2015 Innovator of the Year by Press Ganey and is the recipient of the 2017 Partners in Care Foundation Vision and Excellence in Health Care Leadership Award.