About Biopharma Board Governance
This site exists because thousands of people serve on biopharmaceutical company boards without practical preparation for the role.
Corporate governance training is designed for large public companies with established operations. Biopharma boards — particularly at the preclinical and clinical stage — face fundamentally different challenges: binary scientific risk, capital-intensive timelines, regulatory complexity, and decisions where tens of millions of dollars hinge on data that most board members cannot independently evaluate.
There is no resource that addresses these challenges practically. Law firms publish governance checklists. Academics write about governance theory. Neither speaks to the reality of sitting in a boardroom trying to decide whether to fund a Phase III trial when interim Phase II data is ambiguous and the company has eighteen months of runway.
This site fills that gap with experience-based governance guidance for the people who actually sit in those rooms and make those decisions.
Who This Is For
- New board members joining their first biopharma board and looking for practical orientation beyond the legal basics
- Experienced directors seeking frameworks for the hard decisions that generic governance resources don't address
- Investor directors navigating the dual role of representing capital while fulfilling fiduciary duties
- CEOs and executives who want to understand what effective board governance looks like from the director's perspective
- Advisors and consultants serving biopharma companies who need governance context for their recommendations
About the Author
Lawrence Fine brings direct experience serving on biopharmaceutical company boards, including leadership through Phase II clinical trials to successful exits. With a Stanford PhD in Engineering, an Emory MBA, and seventeen years in M&A and commercialization at Microsoft, he combines deep technical understanding with the strategic and financial judgment that biopharma governance demands.