CAMBRIDGE, Mass.– Lucy Therapeutics, Inc., a private biotech company developing proprietary mitochondrial-based small molecule therapies and biomarkers for neurological diseases, today announced the appointment of business-side biopharma leader Julia Gaebler, Ph.D., as Chief Business Officer. Dr. Gaebler has more than 25 years of business development and strategy experience in the life sciences industry, across biopharma, consulting, and academia.
Dr. Gaebler will direct Lucy Therapeutics’ fundraising, growth and partnership activities for its promising proprietary preclinical compounds in Parkinson’s disease, Rett syndrome, and other diseases of mitochondrial dysfunction.
“As we grow Lucy Therapeutics, the in-house expertise Julia brings will be vital to our success,” said Amy Ripka, Ph.D., CEO and founder of Lucy Therapeutics, “Her diverse business skills, can-do attitude and neurology background are tremendous assets that will help build our team as we embark on the next phase of our drug discovery and development.”
Dr. Gaebler’s extensive experience helping venture capital-backed, pre-commercial, and large pharma companies to realize growth potential spans more than two decades of in-house and consulting positions with life science startups, and small and large pharma companies across numerous therapeutic areas including CNS, cardiometabolic, infectious diseases, and orphan conditions. Prior to joining Lucy Therapeutics, Dr. Gaebler was vice president of commercial strategy and portfolio planning at Milestone Pharmaceuticals and partner at Health Advances, a life-sciences strategy consulting firm. She has also held positions of increasing responsibility and scope at Hoffmann-La Roche, Amylin, and Biogen, where she managed the global market access launches for FAMPRYA® and TECFIDERA®, both indicated for patients with multiple sclerosis.
“Joining the talented and passionate people at Lucy Therapeutics is an opportunity to collaborate on the promising, novel search for much needed therapies that can halt, if not reverse, devastating CNS diseases,” said Gaebler. “I look forward to offering my corporate and business development experience to support Lucy Therapeutics’ focus on mitochondrial dysfunction as a nexus of biological paths contributing to the development of diseases such as Parkinson’s and Rett syndrome.”
In addition to her industry experience, Dr. Gaebler brings substantial health policy and research expertise to the company. She has held adjunct positions at University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, San Diego, and The Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School. She is the author or coauthor of more than 65 articles on health technology assessment, health policy, and economics across biopharma, medtech, diagnostics, and public health that have been published in peer-review journals such as, Nature, Journal of Pediatrics, and Journal of Vascular Surgery, among others.
Dr. Gaebler earned a Ph.D. in health policy and decision sciences from Harvard University, a M.A. in international economics from The Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.
