In March 2020, Aetna Wun Trombley resigned from a company she still loved. NGM Biopharmaceuticals had been her professional home for nine years, long enough for a business-development leader to become chief operating officer, then president and COO. She had helped establish partnerships, build the leadership bench and carry the company through a 2019 public offering. Her next employer did not yet have a public name. The announcement described it only as an undisclosed private company. Three months later, the blank space acquired an identity: Lycia Therapeutics.
The decision is the cleanest way into Trombley's story because it resists the usual executive mythology. She was not escaping a wreck. She was choosing a harder beginning. “Obviously, it would have to be something very special for me to even consider an opportunity outside of NGM,” she said at the time. What qualified was an approach called LYTAC, short for lysosome-targeting chimera. The idea was to tag certain proteins outside a cell and route them toward the cell's own disposal machinery.
A paper can make that journey look like an arrow. A company has to build every inch of the road. Trombley accepted the second problem: turning an elegant scientific mechanism into people, priorities, partnerships, capital and experiments. Six years later, Lycia has completed four announced financings totaling $301.6 million, formed a research collaboration with Eli Lilly, disclosed lead programs and begun the work of generating clinical evidence. The career lesson is less about a single scientific bet than about the kind of operator willing to live between a discovery and its proof.
01 / The apprenticeshipRange before rank
Trombley's route to the CEO chair was not a straight promotion ladder. She studied chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, then completed a Ph.D. in chemistry at MIT. The degree supplied a scientific grammar, but her next roles kept widening the conversation. At McKinsey & Company, she advised pharmaceutical and medical-device clients on strategy, commercial questions and operations. At XenoPort, she worked in business development, strategic planning and licensing. At Novartis in Basel, she served the CEO on corporate initiatives that crossed the company's businesses.
Each job placed her near a different kind of decision. Consulting compresses a problem into a recommendation. Business development asks whether two organizations can create more value together. A CEO staff role exposes the connective tissue of a large enterprise. None is the same as running a research company, but together they teach a useful executive habit: translate before deciding.
NGM became the long apprenticeship. Trombley joined in 2011 to lead business development, became COO in 2015 and added the president title in 2018. The expanding remit matters. Biotechnology companies are coalitions of specialties, each with its own evidence, timing and vocabulary. A partnership cannot outrun the science. A research plan cannot ignore the runway. Hiring too early locks in expense; hiring too late leaves a milestone without an owner. Operations is the practice of making those clocks agree often enough for the company to move.
“Bringing the right people on board is one of the most important aspects of building a biotech company.”Aetna Wun Trombley, on a 2025 leadership appointment
When Trombley later described a new executive hire at Lycia, she led with that sentence. It is conventional enough to glide past, but her record gives it weight. On announcing her departure, NGM's CEO specifically credited her with thoughtful hiring of functional leaders prepared to keep leading after she left. A good operator leaves continuity behind. The compliment was not that she had made herself indispensable; it was that the organization could absorb her exit.
02 / The mechanismTurning an arrow into an organization
Lycia began with work from chemist Carolyn Bertozzi and her Stanford laboratory. The mechanism addressed a geographic constraint. Existing targeted protein-degradation approaches worked inside cells. LYTACs were conceived for proteins outside the cell or attached to its surface. One end recognizes the selected protein. Another engages a trafficking receptor. The combined molecule is internalized and carried to a lysosome, where the target can be broken down.
The premise attracted Versant Ventures, which launched Lycia in June 2020 with a $50 million commitment. Trombley arrived as president and CEO and joined the board. The company then had to make a classic platform decision: preserve the breadth of the idea while selecting programs narrow enough to test. Platform companies sell possibility, but evidence arrives one program at a time.
The sequence that followed was measured. A $70 million Series B arrived in 2021. That year also brought the Lilly collaboration, which paired Lycia's platform with targets selected by the larger company. A $106.6 million Series C followed in 2024. In 2025, Lycia disclosed two lead programs and hired a chief medical officer. In June 2026, a $75 million Series D provided additional capital for clinical work and the next generation of degraders, while a new finance chief and an elevated general counsel expanded the leadership team.
03 / The operating styleConviction with handrails
Trombley's public language is revealing for what it emphasizes: team, translation and the next proof point. When she left NGM, she praised its people and expressed confidence in the structure remaining behind. When she welcomed Lycia's clinical leader, she wrote about fit between experience and the company's immediate needs. When the Series D closed, she connected the financing to a near-term aim - Phase 1 proof-of-concept - rather than treating the round itself as the destination.
This is conviction with handrails. The large belief is that selective protein clearance can support a new therapeutic approach. The smaller commitments are specific hires, financed stretches of work and evidence gates. In research, a sweeping vision is cheap if it cannot be divided into questions that can fail. The operator's job is to protect the ambition while making failure legible early enough to act on it.
Her board work adds another angle. Trombley served as an independent director of Carmot Therapeutics from 2016 until Roche acquired the company in 2024. She also serves as a strategic board member of TCG Labs-Soleil. Boardrooms expose an executive to different scientific programs and organizational patterns without giving her the operator's right to reach for every lever. That distance can sharpen judgment. It forces the distinction between advising a decision and owning one.
There is also a network around the work. Lycia was formed through Bertozzi's laboratory and Versant's company-building engine. Lilly became a collaborator. NGM supplied nine years of operating experience. The Biotech CEO Sisterhood and ElevAAte have provided forums where Trombley appears alongside other women and East Asian American executives. Her 2025 ElevAAte conversation with Pearl Huang and Angie You focused on career journeys, cultural expectations and leading authentically. The connections are not decoration. Biotechnology advances through a dense exchange of talent, capital, scientific ideas and hard-earned pattern recognition.
04 / The next proofThe company catches up to the idea
By 2026, Lycia is no longer the unnamed company Trombley joined. It is a clinical-stage organization with disclosed programs, a larger leadership team and investors financing the next set of tests. Yet the essential tension has not changed. The original idea remains broad. The evidence must remain precise. Progress means letting a grand mechanism encounter narrower and narrower questions.
That may explain why Trombley's career looks coherent despite its variety. Chemistry taught her to respect mechanisms. Consulting and business development taught her to frame choices and negotiate across boundaries. Novartis offered the view from a large corporate center. NGM supplied the repetition of nine operating years. Lycia asks her to use all of it at once, under the pressure of a clock funded in rounds.
The most portable insight is not “take more risk.” It is more exacting: know what would be compelling enough to earn a long stretch of your attention. Trombley had a high threshold because the situation she was leaving was good. That made the decision cleaner. She did not need a story about why NGM had failed her. She needed a scientific premise strong enough to justify starting the operating work again.
Now comes the part no profile can settle in advance. Lycia's programs have to produce evidence. Its team has to turn capital into learning. Its platform has to become more than a persuasive diagram. Trombley's aspiration, stated with the Series D, is near-term clinical proof-of-concept while a new generation of degraders moves forward. The language is appropriately provisional: a goal, a test, a result still to be earned.
Six years after the leap, the story is still in the difficult middle. That is where company building happens - after the elegance of the idea, before the certainty of the outcome, one defensible decision at a time.