Purnanand Sarma

Dr. Purnanand Sarma serves as President and CEO of Immunome (NASDAQ:IMNM). He has 30+ years of experience in all aspects of pharmaceutical and biotechnology business across multiple R&D platforms, ranging from venture-backed biotechnology start-ups to large cap pharmaceutical companies. In addition to conceiving and developing drugs that are commercially sold or in clinical development, Sarma transacted several multi-hundred million products/assets focused on areas of high unmet patient-centric needs, such as cystic fibrosis, interstitial cystitis and bladder cancer and raised over $200M in private and public markets.

Sarma credits his success to keeping the patient as the focal point of inspiration, which is very much needed to develop a clinically meaningful product. While it is well known that human biology is complex, what makes it even more difficult is that any perturbation introduced (like a new drug) elicits a multi-dimensional clinical response that needs to be systematically processed. Developing a new drug is analogous to drawing multiple concentric data circles, with the patient as the center.
Prior to Immunome, Sarma was the CEO of TARIS Biomedical where he sold Taris’ first products to Allergan (NYSE:AGN) for $587M before it was acquired by Johnson & Johnson. Sarma was VP and General Manager of World-wide Drug Delivery Technologies for Cephalon Corporation (NYSE:CEPH) and spent > 10 years at Nektar Therapeutics (NASDAQ:NKTR). He started his career at SmithKline Beecham in King of Prussia, PA after obtaining his PhD in Pharmaceutics from the University of Minnesota and B.Pharm from Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, India.

Favorite Quote: In God we trust, everyone else bring data!