Jesús M. Hernández has a broad experience in leadership positions in pharma & biotech, and in academic drug discovery, translation and innovation.

He spent 20 years in Eli Lilly and Company, where he held different executive positions as Executive Director for Clinical Research and Regulatory Affairs and Vice-president for Medical Affairs for Europe. During that time, he had the opportunity to lead high-performance teams of skillful medics, operations, regulatory and health outcomes experts, having an active participation in the development, registration and commercialization of multiple new medicines in different therapeutic areas. He also had a significant contribution in the transformation of R&D and business models, especially around patient outcomes research and integrated patient and prescriber approaches, and had a leading role in the establishment of LRL Discovery facilities in Alcobendas, Spain, eventual birthplace for abemaciclib.

He was Managing Director of CIMA, Center for Applied Medical Research (Cima University of Navarra, Spain) from 2010 to 2016, where he fostered the translational aim and designed a new economic model for the center. At that time, he also was CEO of Digna Biotech and member of the Boards of Hepacyl Therapeutics and Formune Vaccines, all CIMA’s startups. He was a leading agent in the deal between CIMA and Vivet Therapeutics, a start-up biotech co-founded by CIMA based on its own gene-therapy research, helping to raise what, at that time, arguably was one of the leading Series-A funding for a company with licensed Spanish academic biotechnology. He served as a Board Member of Vivet Therapeutics.

Recently, as an Independent Consultant in biotech, he has assisted CIMA in the process of building two new start-ups (Handl Therapeutics and Hemostatics Therapeutics, among others) and serves as Chairman of the Board for Telum Therapeutics. He is a mentor of Biointaxis SL, a gene therapy company, through the Caixaimpulse program.

He holds and MD and a PhD in Medicine, with specialization in Infectious Disease. He has taken several senior executive programs at London Business School, IESE Business School, INSEAD and Harvard Business School, among others.