Wow, $40 Million for Xenon Pharma!!!

Working for myself, by myself, with just me and Rosie (my chocolate lab) has its ups and downs. August and December are probably the slowest months of the year, but it's fine. Still a couple of deals on the go.

Recruiting in biotech, as far as I can tell, is a bit different from other fields, especially when the head of a biotech company comes from IT and is trying to recruit top talent for top positions. In biotech and drug development, the transferrable skills that someone has would only be apparent to a recruiter that has, say, experience like myself. The biological and biotech research performed by many individuals has a variety of levels of understanding and applications, kinda like a a venn diagram, but enless you know how the two individual areas or functions add up, you would never deduce the overlapping areas. This is a dilemma I'm having with a non-biotech CEO who was incredibly successful in IT, but doesn't have a sniff how to recruit the best leaders to help a start-up biotech company, in my opinion.

Actually, even more interesting today, is that Xenon Pharmaceuticals, in Vancouver, signed a deal with Roche that could bring them $40 Million in various different avenues. Why are they interesting to me, Xenon that is? Xenon was founded by my PhD Supervisor, and a few others from my PhD days in Vancouver at UBC. Other people that I am very close with, are still instrumental in that company, leading either the executive or scientific team. It is kinda cool to see how this company grew from a couple people working in a lab, to a company with its own building, and my friends raising hundreds of millions of dollars over the years for biotech research. Surf over to the Xenon web page and see what kind of cool stuff they're doing here in Canada.

I did place a couple of people at Xenon a few years back, one is still there, the other is pursuing other interests, I believe.

I don't want this to be "another recruiting blog", but a different kind of blog, with a "me" and "biotech" slant (I believe blogging was started by one of the biggest narccicists (sp?) ever.