Dr. Peter Hecht, CEO of Ironwood Pharmaceuticals, will deliver the next Dialogues of Discovery lecture at Janelia. Hecht’s talk, “Building Ironwood Pharmaceuticals from Scratch: Over 2 Million Patients Benefitting and Just Getting Started,” is on Wednesday, May 16 at 7:00 p.m. All Dialogues of Discovery lectures are free and open to the public, but tickets are required for admission.
About the Talk
Coming from a background in basic research, Hecht founded Ironwood with three other scientists twenty years ago. Since then, they have built a business focused on creating and commercializing medicines to improve the lives of patients; to date, three marketed drugs for IBS-C and refractory gout, and exciting drug candidates in the pipeline for diabetic microvascular disease, heart failure, sickle cell disease, dementia, and liver diseases. In this talk, Hecht will share lessons learned, challenges, and successes of using a collaborative science approach to making medicine and building a biotech company from the ground up.
About Peter Hecht
Hecht has served as Ironwood’s CEO and a director since co‐founding the company in 1998. He started Ironwood because he was attracted to “the idea of working with a team of people who challenge, inspire and humble me,” and building an enduring organization dedicated to creating important medicines. Under his leadership, Ironwood has grown from nine PhD scientists to a commercial biotechnology company. Prior to founding Ironwood, Peter was a research fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, an affiliate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He earned his PhD in molecular biology from the University of California at Berkeley as well as a BS in mathematics and an MS in biology from Stanford University.