Early Achievements

While still attending Harvard Business School, Jim organized a group of Harvard and MIT professors around the challenge of creating a drug for less than $1 million. In 1991, Jim co-founded GelTex Pharmaceuticals with Harvard Institute Professor, George Whitesides and was able to successfully design Renvela with just three chemists and $1 million. GelTex was bought by Genzyme/Sanofi for $1.4 billion. Renvela has treated tens of millions of patients with renal failure.

In 1997, Jim co-founded Theravance with George Whitesides, Roy Vagelos and Mathai Mammen around the concept of making more potent and avid drugs by leveraging linker chemistry to connect two existing drug pieces that acted against drug targets that were proximal to each other. Theravance has produced a number of marketed products including products that are used by tens of millions of patients with asthma and COPD in partnership with GSK (Anoro, Incruse, Trelegy).

In between the founding of GelTex and Theravance, Jim was a partner at Sierra Ventures and led investments in Healtheon/WebMD, Amerigroup (Anthem) which became two iconic venture investments from the middle of the 90s. Jim also had a stint as a product manager at Merck of Prilosec and was a team member that helped the product become the largest selling drug in the world.

Venture Capital and Company Building

Jim has focused his career on building companies and investment organizations and academic research to solve important problems and needs in healthcare.

Since 2011, Jim’s focus has been on building Foresite Capital, a firm he founded and named because he wanted to be the funding “site” for companies using science and engineering to more efficiently transform the healthcare economy. Since 2011, Foresite Capital has funded numerous companies that have brought important products to market and have had more than 50 IPOs.

In building Foresite, Jim has emphasized technical expertise in clinical medicine, data science methods, genetics, biochemistry, data science and machine learning. Jim also co-founded Foresite Labs to help accelerate the incubation of companies that use machine learning in biotech, life sciences and healthcare delivery.

Foresite Capital and Foresite Labs have rare multidisciplinary teams in the investment and start-up industry; combining both biotech, genetics, and machine learning. They are uniquely positioned to fund healthcare transformation over the next decade.