Bristol-Myers Squibb has appointed Frances Heller as senior vice president, business development.
Reporting to the pharma company’s CEO Lamberto Andreotti, she will also sit on the BMS senior management team.
Heller comes to BMS from Exelixis, a San Francisco-based genomics drug discovery company, where she was executive vice president of business development.
Prior to that she served as head of strategic alliances at Novartis and before that as corporate and intellectual property counsel for Celera Genomics.
“With broad experience across both the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, I believe Fran will be an important addition to my diverse management team and to the company,” said Andreotti.
“In addition, her scientific, business and legal background, as well as her experience across therapeutic areas, will help Bristol-Myers Squibb continue to execute its strategy of finding external innovation that complements our own internal R&D pipeline and helps us bring important new medicines to patients.”