There is a moment in every biotechnology story when the vocabulary changes. A result becomes an asset. An experiment becomes a program. The scientist who can explain what happened at the bench must hand the work to people who can finance, protect, test, manufacture and govern it. Barry Selick has spent more than four decades living inside that change of language. He has been the scientist making the discovery, the founder building around one, the investor judging a pitch, the chief executive raising money, the board chair asking questions and the university leader deciding which ideas deserve another turn of the crank.
In January 2023, that long circuit brought him to Hinge Bio, a small Burlingame company built around a modular antibody platform called GEM-DIMER. Selick did not found Hinge. He joined when the founders believed the platform was ready for a different kind of work: building the management, financing and development machinery required to move from laboratory claims toward clinical evidence. By April 2026, the company had announced its first subject dosed in a Phase 1 study. Between those two dates sit a $30 million financing, an expanded development team, a regulatory clearance and a Japan partnership. They are the visible artifacts of an operating job that mostly happens in meetings, documents and decisions.
The first translation
Selick’s career began in biophysics and biology at the University of Pennsylvania, followed by postdoctoral work at UCSF in the laboratory of biochemist Bruce Alberts. The Bay Area he entered in the 1980s was already rewriting the relationship between academic biology and private enterprise, but the border remained culturally charged. Selick later recalled that entrepreneurship was “almost a bad word” during those postdoctoral years. The irony is useful: he would return to UCSF three decades later with a mandate to make entrepreneurship easier.
Before the executive titles, there was a consequential spell at Protein Design Labs. Selick worked with colleagues on technology for making therapeutic antibodies more human-like in their protein sequence. He helped apply the approach to PDL’s first product, which was later developed and commercialized by Roche. UCSF’s account of the work notes that he became a finalist for the European Patent Office’s 2014 Inventor of the Year Award. It was a compact early lesson in leverage. A technical method developed by a small group could travel through patents, licenses, development organizations and many years before its practical value became visible.
“It’s high-risk, high-reward.” Selick’s preferred response was to bias the odds through selection, evidence and experienced collaborators.Barry Selick, on building UCSF’s innovation strategy
At Affymax Research Institute, where he eventually became vice president of research, the lens widened from a single technical contribution to drug discovery and technology development as an organizational system. Affymax was acquired by Glaxo Wellcome and became a discovery-technology center. Selick represented it on a global committee focused on improving how discovery worked across the larger company. The job was no longer just to know whether an experiment was elegant. It was to understand whether a process could repeatedly produce decisions.
Founder time, investor time, public-company time
In 1999, Selick co-founded Camitro, a California- and UK-based company working on predictive modeling for drug discovery. Two years later, ArQule acquired it. The quick exit was followed by a much longer chapter. Selick joined Threshold Pharmaceuticals as chief executive in 2002, beginning with its Series A financing. He would lead the company through an initial public offering and remain CEO until 2017, when Threshold was sold to Molecular Templates. Nearly 15 years is enough time for strategy to encounter reality more than once.
For five of those years he also served as a venture partner at Sofinnova Ventures. The overlap matters because investor time and company time run at different speeds. A venture portfolio can diversify risk across multiple bets. A chief executive cannot diversify the attention owed to one payroll, one board and one set of programs. Selick’s later language about “biasing the odds” sounds less like optimism than portfolio logic translated for an operator: pick with care, create stronger proof and bring in people who can expose weak assumptions early.
Discovery to evidence
Turn an interesting result into a reproducible case that can survive scrutiny outside the originating lab.
Evidence to capital
Explain what the next dollar will prove, how long it will take and what a disappointing result would mean.
Capital to organization
Build the team, governance and operating cadence that convert a financing into durable progress.
Organization to partner
Prepare the data, rights and development plan so another institution can responsibly carry the work forward.
Board service became a parallel education. Selick served as a director of Amunix, as lead director and later chairman of PDL BioPharma, and as chairman of Catalyst Biosciences. He currently chairs Protagonist Therapeutics. A board sees a company in intervals, through prepared materials and the questions management chooses to surface. The scientist’s instinct is to ask what the data supports. The operator’s instinct is to ask what must happen next. The chair’s job is to keep both questions alive without quietly taking the chief executive’s seat.
The UCSF return
In 2017, Selick left Threshold and returned to UCSF as its first vice chancellor for business development, innovation and partnerships. He arrived expecting to search for faculty members with inventions that might have commercial potential. The surprise was a queue. “For every faculty member I went to, four or five came to me,” he said. The campus did not lack ambition. It needed a clearer path for converting that ambition into proof, protection and partnerships.
Selick’s remit gathered technology management, industry alliances, the Catalyst program and the Entrepreneurship Center into a broader Innovation Ventures effort. His core argument concerned timing. If a university licenses an early finding too quickly, a company may put it on a shelf or capture much of the value created by the next experiment. If the university can fund selected proof-of-concept work, it can learn which ideas deserve to move, improve the terms of a later partnership and keep more value for future research.
That argument became the InVent Fund, a philanthropic vehicle designed to support a small number of promising projects before licensing or company formation. Selick had spent years raising institutional and venture money. At UCSF he pursued donors willing to finance the uncertain middle between a laboratory finding and an investable package. It was the same handoff again, redesigned for an academic institution whose incentives, budgets and tolerance for commercial language differ from a startup’s.
He expected to find the entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs found him.Four or five faculty members approached for every one Selick contacted
The episode also revealed something about Selick’s working style without requiring a personality test. He tends to describe innovation in mechanisms: advisory boards, proof-of-concept studies, selection criteria, funding sources and the next responsible owner. Even his enthusiasm comes with an operating noun attached. When he praised the entrepreneurial demand at UCSF, the response was not merely celebration. It was to build a system capable of receiving it.
Back inside one bet
Hinge Bio offered the return trip in 2023. The company’s founders had developed GEM-DIMER, a format intended to assemble multivalent and multispecific antibody constructs. Selick entered as chief executive and director alongside a management expansion. Carin Mueller Rollins became chief operating officer, and Joshua Carle joined as chief business officer. Later hires added clinical, operations and manufacturing leadership. The sequence reflected the company’s changing problem: scientific possibility now needed a development organization around it.
In January 2025, Hinge announced a $30 million Series A’ led by Point72, with Ridgeback Capital, InVivium Capital and Lightswitch Capital among the participants. The company said the money would support its lead candidate’s entry into clinical development and additional constructs from the platform. That September it announced more senior hires and a peer-reviewed preclinical publication. October brought regulatory clearance in the United States and a co-development and licensing agreement granting Kyorin Pharmaceutical exclusive rights in Japan for the lead program. In April 2026, Hinge announced the first subject dosed.
These milestones do not resolve the scientific questions in front of the company. They define the right to ask them at the next level of rigor. That distinction is central to long-cycle businesses. A financing is not an outcome, but it funds the work that can produce one. Regulatory clearance is not evidence of effectiveness, but it allows a study to begin. A partnership is not a finished market, but it gives a program another capable owner in another geography. Good operating language keeps each achievement in its proper tense.
Selick’s résumé can look like a collection of titles until it is read as one repeated task. At PDL, a technical method had to travel beyond the bench. At Camitro, a technology needed a company. At Threshold, capital had to become years of organized development. At UCSF, discoveries needed enough proof to command serious partners. At Hinge Bio, a platform needed to become a clinical program.
The pattern is less glamorous than the word “innovation” and more useful. Build the next piece of evidence. Learn the language of the next stakeholder. Design the handoff before it arrives. Then stay close enough to the underlying science that the story never outruns the result.