Andrea
Ashford-Hicks
She spent twenty years getting medicines through the hardest door in science. Then she walked into a startup with one molecule and said yes.
A big-pharma career, parked outside a startup with the engine running.
Andrea Ashford-Hicks runs Cayuga Biotech, an early-stage company built around a single idea borrowed from the human body. Platelets, when they clot, release a chain called inorganic polyphosphate. Cayuga's science copies it. Her job is to turn that copy into something regulators approve, investors fund, and clinicians can actually reach for. She took the seat in 2022.
Most people who spend two decades at names like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson stay near the gravity of large organizations. The resources are real. The safety net is real. Ashford-Hicks went the other direction - toward a company small enough that the lead candidate and the cap table fit on the same whiteboard.
That is the strange specific worth holding onto. She did not arrive as a first-time founder with a dream and a deck. She arrived having already done the part that breaks most biotechs: getting an ultra-rare therapy across the finish line at the FDA. She knows exactly how unglamorous the work is. She signed up anyway.
At a glance
The hard part of biotech is not the science slide. It is the years of footnotes between a good idea and a patient who gets the medicine.
- The throughline of a 20-year career in late-stage development
She got a therapy almost nobody had heard of through the FDA.
Before Cayuga, there was RETHYMIC. At Enzyvant Therapeutics, Ashford-Hicks served as Senior Vice President of Late-Stage Development and Commercialization. Under her leadership the company secured FDA approval for RETHYMIC, an allogeneic processed thymus tissue therapy, for pediatric congenital athymia - a condition so rare most clinicians will never see a case.
Approvals like that do not happen by momentum. They happen because someone manages a thousand small regulatory decisions without losing the thread. That is the resume line that made a seed-stage board comfortable handing her the keys: she has carried a novel modality from late-stage development all the way to a launch.
Across her career she has touched multiple approvals and launches - IND, BLA, NDA, the full alphabet of the process - in progressive roles at Agenus, EMD Serono, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Schering-Plough. Cayuga describes a team whose combined work spans more than 50 drugs. She is the operator at the center of that experience.
Where she has worked
Illustrative tenure footprint across named employers. Not to scale.
Cayuga's whole pitch is biomimicry - copy what the body already does.
The foundational science traces to research by Cayuga advisor James Morrissey: inorganic polyphosphate, released from activated human platelets, is a potent modulator of blood clotting. Cayuga's lead candidate, CAY001, is built on that insight. In three plain steps:
Borrow the signal
Platelets naturally release polyphosphate when they activate. Nature already solved the problem - Cayuga takes notes.
Build the mimic
CAY001 is a polyphosphate-based candidate designed to work with the clotting cascade rather than against it.
Chase the unmet need
The target is severe bleeding - the kind that is hard to reach, hard to compress, and short on options.
From Ivy lecture halls to the CEO chair.
The hybrid edge
Two undergraduate degrees, one university. One in a hard science, one in high finance. It is a rare combination, and it shows up in how she runs a biotech.
She does not need a translator for either side of the room.
Three things that make the story stick.
Cayuga is one of New York's Finger Lakes. The founder is a Cornell alum - the company wears its roots in its name.
She traded the resources of Pfizer and J&J for a company built around one molecule. The safety net for the upside.
Cayuga's team has been recognized on the conference circuit, including a best-presentation nod at a blood-science symposium.
You can spend a career adding zeros to a giant company's revenue. Or you can take everything you learned and point it at the thing that does not exist yet.
- The bet Andrea Ashford-Hicks made in 2022