Chief Executive Officer; IFM Therapeutics
H. Martin Seidel, Ph.D. has been Chief Executive Officer at IFM Therapeutics since 2019. He first joined IFM as Executive Vice President of Research and Development in 2017. IFM has achieved three successful exits with realized proceeds of $750M and more than $4B in success-based milestones based on $58M in invested capital across its IFM Uno, Due and Tre subsidiaries. Martin also serves as an Advisor to Lightstone Ventures, a biotech- and medtech-focused venture firm.
Martin joined IFM from Novartis, where he was Vice President and Global Head of Strategic Alliances (BD&L) for Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR) from 2014-17. In that role, he and his team executed more than 70 deals that encompassed in-licenses, out-licenses, collaborations, acquisitions and equity investments. Prior to that, Martin was head of NIBR’s Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF), an institute of approximately 600 associates focused on drug discovery, target discovery and technology development. Over 11 years at GNF, he helped advance more than 40 clinical candidates, including 25 programs that progressed to the clinic, 13 new molecular entities that achieved positive clinical proof of concept and more than nine molecules that are now either FDA-approved drugs or in late-stage clinical development. Prior to his time at Novartis, Martin served in increasingly senior discovery roles at DuPont Pharma and Ligand Pharmaceuticals. He is currently an independent Board member of Third Harmonic Bio (NASDAQ:THRD).
Martin earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University in the laboratory of Jeremy R. Knowles. Prior to his graduate work, he spent a year at the Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg on a DAAD Fellowship and received his A.B. from Princeton University.