Alicia Secor’s career began close to the ground. Before the board seats, venture rounds, and CEO titles, she was a hospital-based sales representative at Pfizer. It is the sort of starting point that can disappear beneath an executive biography, but it explains something useful about the three decades that followed. A scientific idea may begin in a lab. A company only works when that idea can survive contact with customers, regulators, capital, colleagues, partners, and time.
Secor has spent her professional life at those points of contact. She moved from sales into clinical and commercial operations at Centocor, then into business development at Alkermes. In 1998, she joined Genzyme and stayed for 15 years, taking on jobs of increasing scope until she was running its metabolic diseases business. Her remit there crossed product development, launch, global expansion, teams, transactions, and profit-and-loss responsibility. It was an unusually complete education in how a biotechnology business fits together.
The pattern after Genzyme was faster and more varied: operating chief at Synageva BioPharma, commercial chief at Zafgen, president and CEO of Juniper Pharmaceuticals, then president and CEO of Atalanta Therapeutics. Each company presented a different version of the same puzzle. The science had value. The institution around it had to be designed for the next milestone.
The operating pattern
The company changes when the stage changes
Biotechnology biographies tend to read like itineraries: one company, another company, one board, another board. Secor’s makes more sense as a sequence of transitions. At Juniper, she became CEO in August 2016. Two years later, Catalent agreed to acquire the company for $11.50 a share in cash, a transaction valued at roughly $133 million. The buyer wanted Juniper’s formulation and development capabilities in Nottingham, along with a commercial franchise. Secor had taken charge of a public company, reset its direction, and brought it to a strategic outcome.
Her board work adds another angle. She served at Orchard Therapeutics until its 2024 acquisition by Kyowa Kirin, at GW Pharmaceuticals before its acquisition by Jazz Pharmaceuticals, and at G1 Therapeutics before its acquisition by Pharmacosmos. A board director does not create those outcomes alone. But repeated exposure to them builds a particular kind of judgment: what a buyer values, where an organization is fragile, how incentives travel through a company, and which decisions preserve options.
Today, she sits on Zevra Therapeutics’ audit and compensation committees. She also mentors through the Termeer Institute, whose fellows program is built for first-time CEOs of early-stage life-sciences organizations. The connection is apt. Secor’s most transferable knowledge is not tied to one molecule or market. It is the accumulated feel for company stage.
The Atalanta chapter
Building while the world worked through screens
Atalanta sharpened that skill. The company was founded around university research into RNA interference, a way of silencing the expression of selected genes. Secor joined in 2019, while the company was still being formed. Its public launch came in January 2021, when offices, laboratories, investors, and recruits were all adjusting to the pandemic. Atalanta arrived with $110 million in committed funding, backing from F-Prime Capital, and collaborations with Biogen and Genentech.
This was company building without the usual physical cues. Teams had to form before hallway conversations could do their quiet work. Scientific founders, investors, operators, and large partners had to agree on how research would become a portfolio. A launch announcement can compress that labor into a number and a date. The operating reality is hundreds of smaller decisions about which capability belongs inside the company, which can be borrowed from a partner, and which milestone deserves the next dollar.
The transition from research to clinical stage is a critical time for any biotech.Alicia Secor, on the 2025 Atalanta leadership transition
By 2024, Atalanta described a portfolio of 14 wholly owned and partnered programs. In January 2025, it closed an oversubscribed $97 million Series B. The company said that financings and partnerships had generated $262 million in total capital by then. Those numbers matter because they trace an institutional arc. A platform born from academic work had become a financed organization with a pipeline, development candidates, major collaborators, and plans for clinical entry.
Capital as a bridge, not a finish line
Then came a decision that is harder to put on a chart. In June 2025, Secor stepped down in a planned transition. Stephen Knight of F-Prime credited her with leading Atalanta “from formation to the cusp of entry into the clinic.” Secor stayed on as an adviser during the handoff and framed the change around stage rather than status. The next chief executive, Joanne Kotz, brought experience moving platform companies into clinical development.
There is discipline in leaving a job when the organization needs a different shape of leadership. Biotech can turn founder mythology and CEO identity into permanent fixtures. Secor’s version of stewardship accepts that the company is the project. The role belongs to whoever can best move it through the present constraint.
The Paratus mandate
A new kind of raw material
Paratus gives Secor a different scientific premise and a familiar organizational moment. The Boston and Singapore company looks to evolutionary biology for drug-discovery signals. Its platform combines proprietary genomic and tissue-derived data, human datasets, public mammalian resources, and AI models. The proprietary data spans more than 140 bat species, chosen because bats exhibit biological adaptations that are useful to study under unusual physical and environmental pressures.
The idea is conceptually elegant: natural selection has run experiments for millions of years. Species that tolerate extreme conditions may carry clues to mechanisms worth investigating. The corporate work is to make that elegance specific. A signal must become a target. A target must survive validation. A program must earn resources. A portfolio must have priorities.
Its lead program, PS-1001, is preclinical. Paratus is preparing it for first-in-human studies while developing additional programs in two broad areas: immunology and cardiometabolism. Secor joined with other senior appointments in finance, clinical development, and medical advising. That cluster of hires says as much as the press release language. The company is adding the machinery needed to move from a discovery story to a development organization.
Paratus has all the elements of a company with the potential to build something important.Alicia Secor, April 2026
Secor’s public description of the work is concrete: move PS-1001 toward initial human studies, then build a deeper portfolio. The sentence contains the central tension of platform biotechnology. One program creates focus and proof. A wider portfolio preserves the value of the platform. Push only the lead program and the platform can become a slogan. Keep generating possibilities and the organization can scatter. The CEO has to set the sequence.
What the record teaches
An operator’s ledger
Formation, clinical development, commercialization, and acquisition require different operating systems.
The team and capital structure should answer the next consequential question, not every possible question.
Atalanta’s launch paired internal platform work with external capital and collaborations.
Succession can be part of company building when the next stage calls for a different leadership fit.
The career does not offer a tidy founder legend. Secor did not invent the RNAi architecture at Atalanta or the comparative-biology thesis at Paratus. Her work is the institutional craft that lets invention keep moving. She recruits around the next bottleneck, connects capital to proof, gives partnerships a place in the plan, and recognizes when a strategic transaction or leadership change serves the company.
That craft is easy to underestimate because success often looks like somebody else’s headline. A scientist publishes the finding. An investor announces the round. A buyer names the price. A candidate enters development. In between sits the operating system that keeps those events connected.
Secor’s path from a hospital sales territory to the leadership of platform companies gives her a wide-angle view of that system. She has worked near the customer, inside a large global organization, across small public companies, beside academic founders, and around board tables. At Paratus, those layers meet again. The biology begins with outlier species. The business challenge is deeply familiar: decide what matters next, build the organization that can do it, and leave the company ready for the chapter after that.