In July 2025, Pulmotect announced that the first people had been dosed in a 100-patient Phase 2 trial. It was the sort of sentence biotechnology companies are built to issue: compact, procedural, heavy with years of invisible preparation. For Colin Broom, the company's chief executive, it also marked another arrival in a career made almost entirely of long approaches.
The trial placed an inhaled drug candidate called PUL-042 into a double-blind, placebo-controlled study at oncology centers around the United States. Pulmotect's idea is to stimulate the lung's innate defenses rather than chase one pathogen at a time. The science came out of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Texas A&M University. Broom came to it after decades spent learning what occurs between an interesting molecule and a medicine someone can actually use.
That interval is biotech's long middle. It contains trial design, financing, regulators, manufacturing, investigators, board meetings and the occasional public offering. It asks for scientific fluency and a tolerance for paperwork that could make a tax lawyer blink. Broom has worked on nearly every part of it.
The apprenticeship was the industry
Broom studied pharmacology at University College London, then medicine at St George's Hospital Medical School. He became a member of the Royal College of Physicians and a fellow of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine. Those credentials put one foot in clinical judgment and another in the organized business of developing therapies.
His early corporate education unfolded across companies whose names read like layers in a geological core. At Glaxo and SmithKline Beecham, he rose through clinical pharmacology and later led development areas including oncology, the central nervous system and gastroenterology. At Hoechst Marion Roussel, later part of Sanofi, he held global responsibility for clinical development strategy. At Amgen, from 2000 to 2003, he led European clinical development and medical affairs.
The product list attached to those years is broad: Lantus, Hycamtin, Paxil, Requip, Kytril and Famvir among the programs to which he made major contributions. Later, at Amgen, his tenure included European approvals connected to Aranesp, Neulasta and Kineret. A list like that can resemble a pharmacy shelf. In career terms, it means repeated exposure to the same stern question: can a promising program survive the transition from an internal plan to external scrutiny?
The ten-year laboratory
In May 2004, Broom joined ViroPharma as vice president and chief scientific officer. The appointment made him responsible for product development and gave him a central role in business development. He stayed until Shire acquired the company in 2014, a decade in which the job expanded across research, development and medical affairs.
ViroPharma was smaller than the pharmaceutical groups that trained him. Its programs therefore joined science and corporate strategy at close range. Development priorities affected the company's identity; business-development choices could redraw its future. Broom also served on the board of NPS Pharmaceuticals from 2009 until Shire bought that company in 2015. His view of the industry was no longer confined to the clinical function. It included capital allocation, governance and what an acquirer sees when it reads the evidence.
He is named on pharmaceutical patents from the ViroPharma period, including work involving transplant medicine and neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorders. The patent record is less a portrait of a lone inventor than a trace of an executive still close enough to the science to appear in its paperwork.
The difficult journey
After ViroPharma, Broom took over Nabriva Therapeutics in 2014. The Austrian biotech was developing lefamulin, a pleuromutilin antibiotic intended for bacterial pneumonia. In 2015, it closed the first tranche of a large Series B financing, then went public in the United States through a $106.1 million initial offering.
A local business journal put Broom's own verdict on the IPO trip into its headline: “It wasn't an easy journey.” The remark has aged well because it declines to retrofit struggle into destiny. Nabriva needed money, Phase 3 work and a case for a drug in a field where scientific need does not automatically become a durable market.
Broom stepped down as chief executive in July 2018 but remained a director until 2023. Lefamulin won United States approval in 2019. The chronology matters. Biotechnology regularly separates the people who begin a development chapter from those present when it closes. Broom's work helped carry the program through late development and helped create the public company that completed the route.
Joined ViroPharma to lead product development.
Became chief executive of Nabriva Therapeutics.
Led Nabriva through a $106.1 million Nasdaq offering.
Joined Pulmotect as chief executive.
Pulmotect began dosing its 100-patient Phase 2 study.
A small company with a wide thesis
Broom joined Pulmotect in September 2019. The Houston company had a compact team and a large proposition. PUL-042 combines two agents designed to activate receptors in the lung's surface cells, prompting a broad innate immune response. Pulmotect calls the approach pathogen agnostic because it aims at the host response rather than a particular virus, bacterium or fungus.
His arrival supplied a familiar kind of experience to an unfamiliar program. He had seen drug candidates across therapeutic areas, company sizes and financing environments. He had also watched acquisitions from inside the target, taken a company public and remained on boards after operating roles changed.
Five months into his tenure, events gave the company's thesis an urgent new context. Pulmotect redirected resources toward studies related to SARS-CoV-2 while continuing to frame the longer program around vulnerable populations. The United States Department of Defense committed up to $6 million in 2021 to support two Phase 2 studies. Pulmotect later reported signals of antiviral activity from the exploratory trials while acknowledging the work as an early clinical proof of concept.
Department of Defense support, a CPRIT product-development grant and Series C equity are different forms of capital; the bars compare announced headline amounts.
The financing sequence shows the chief executive's other laboratory. In 2023, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas awarded an $8.9 million product-development grant. In September 2024, Pulmotect announced an oversubscribed $5.9 million Series C led by Fannin Partners with participation from Axil Capital. The equity and grant were directed toward the antiviral trial and further development of PUL-042.
How an operator sounds
Broom's public language has a consistent grammar. He thanks funders. He names collaborators. He describes milestones as steps. When he joined Pulmotect, he spoke of working with the team, key collaborators and experts to move the program ahead. When the Series C closed, he connected the investors directly to the planned trial. When dosing began, he called the study “a key stepping stone.”
The phrasing suits a business where certainty is rationed. A chief executive has to make the future vivid enough for people to finance it, yet specific enough for a trial to challenge it. The useful unit of progress is the next defensible decision.
There is also a visible preference for teams over mythology. Pulmotect's work joins academic inventors, a small company, government grant makers, investors, contract researchers and major cancer centers. Broom's career has connected similar systems at a larger scale. Drug development, as his résumé quietly insists, is a relay discipline. Even the chief executive spends much of the race arranging handoffs.
The next sentence belongs to the data
The current study targets three respiratory viruses in immunosuppressed people with hematologic malignancies or stem-cell transplants. PUL-042 or placebo is administered three times over six days, with lower respiratory tract complications measured over 28 days. The registry lists cancer centers around the country and names Broom among the central contacts and study officials.
A trial can be described precisely before its answer exists. That distinction gives the 2025 milestone its proper scale. Dosing the first patients was neither an approval nor a conclusion. It was the earned beginning of a test.
Broom has reached such beginnings through big-company systems, acquisitions, board service, venture rounds and public markets. The settings changed; the professional problem endured. Science proposes. A development organization has to translate the proposal into a sequence the world can examine.
Biotechnology usually keeps its spotlight for invention and arrival. The long middle gets fluorescent office light. Colin Broom has chosen that middle for more than 35 years, which explains why his career comes into focus between its headline events. The acquisitions and the IPO matter. So do the protocols, the collaborators and the unglamorous next steps that made each headline possible. At Pulmotect, another one is underway.