LSIPR 50 2018: Jim Tananbaum

Name: Jim Tananbaum

Organisation: Foresite Capital

Position: CEO and Managing Director

Jim Tananbaum has recently led a $58 million financing round for DNAnexus, a cloud-based genome informatics and data management platform aiming to improve the ease of working with genomic data. The funding included strategic investment from Microsoft and Alphabet (formally Google Ventures), among others.

Tananbaum sits on the board of directors of DNAnexus. Its cloud-based platform enables the management and analysis of large volumes of genomic data and was chosen for use by AstraZeneca’s Centre for Genomics Research, a project hoping to analyse more than two million genomes over a decade to inform drug discovery and development.

Tananbaum has led numerous investments over the course of his career. He leveraged his experiences as a biopharmaceutical entrepreneur and healthcare investment firm co-founder to develop Foresite as a unique and innovative investment platform. The work of Foresite is motivated by Tananbaum’s belief that healthcare transformation requires learning systems which are driven by radically collaborative data science approaches.

Prior to founding Foresite, Tananbaum co-founded two biopharmaceutical companies and two healthcare investment practices. While finishing his studies at Harvard University Medical and Business Schools he founded GelTex Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired in 1998 by Sanofi-Genzyme for $1.6 billion. Its lead drug Renvela (sevelamer), which is used to control phosphorus levels in patients with chronic kidney disease, is estimated to produce close to $1 billion in annual revenue.

Alongside his MD and MBA from Harvard, Tananbaum has an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also has a BS and BSEE from Yale University in applied math and computer science and is a member of Yale’s University Council and the advisory committee of the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science.