Craig Gibbs began with proteins, which is another way of saying he began with consequences. Change a molecular shape and a whole chain of events may follow. The lesson scales surprisingly well. Across nearly four decades in biotechnology, Gibbs has kept moving outward from the molecule without losing sight of it: first into research leadership, then corporate development, commercial planning, boards, fundraising and the CEO chair. Every move added another layer to the same operating puzzle. A discovery is only as useful as the organization capable of carrying it forward.
In May 2026, that long apprenticeship brought him to Vivace Therapeutics as president, chief executive and a member of the board. Vivace is a compact San Mateo company developing small molecules aimed at the Hippo-YAP-TEAD signaling pathway, a system involved in controlling cellular growth. The assignment arrives at a particular moment. The company is no longer asking only whether its core idea is interesting. Its lead molecule, VT3989, has entered the clinic, generated a visible signal in a Phase I/II study and accumulated regulatory milestones. The scientific question is narrowing. The organizational questions are getting larger.
A career built in the handoffs
Gibbs's education happened across three geographies and three complementary disciplines. He studied biochemistry at Massey University in New Zealand, completed a doctorate in molecular biology at the University of Glasgow, and later earned an MBA from Golden Gate University in San Francisco. Before the business degree, though, came the bench: a postdoctoral role in Genentech's protein-engineering department.
That foundation matters because biotech careers often divide into camps. Scientists guard the mechanism. Commercial teams study the eventual market. Business development turns programs into transactions. Finance buys time. Gibbs crossed those borders early enough to understand that each camp is working with a different version of uncertainty. The scientist wants cleaner evidence. The dealmaker wants an asset that can survive diligence. The commercial planner wants to know where it could fit years from now. The operator has to decide what to fund this quarter.
At Gilead, Gibbs had enough time to learn those clocks from the inside. From 1992 to 2013, he held roles in biology research, corporate development and, eventually, commercial strategy, planning and operations. Public biographies credit him with contributing to the development, launch and commercialization of 12 approved medicines. The useful detail is not simply the count. It is the sequence. Discovery, transaction and launch were not abstract departments on an org chart. They were stages he had worked inside.
Long tenures can create specialists or translators. Gibbs emerged as the latter. By the time he left Gilead, his working vocabulary included molecular biology and market structure, protein engineering and portfolio logic. The MBA did not replace his scientific training. It gave him another way to decide where the next scarce dollar and the next scarce month should go.
“I recognized how elegant it was and with more specificity, and it had an upside that could help lots of people.”Craig Gibbs, recalling his first response to Asher Bio's platform
The Forty Seven chapter
In 2015 Gibbs joined Forty Seven as chief business officer. The Stanford-rooted company was developing an antibody aimed at CD47, a signal tumors can exploit to evade immune attack. Business officer can sound like a role adjacent to the science. In a young biotech, it sits in the middle of it. Partnerships, financing, positioning and program choices all depend on what the evidence can honestly support.
Forty Seven went public in 2018. Two years later, Gilead agreed to acquire it for about $4.9 billion. The symmetry is hard to miss: Gibbs had left Gilead, helped build an oncology company outside it, and then watched his former employer buy the result. The deal is the kind of milestone that can dominate a biography. It should not obscure the slower skill beneath it. For five years, the company had to keep turning experimental progress into institutional confidence.
Evidence earns capital. Capital buys experiments. Experiments produce the next evidence. A biotech leader's job is to keep that loop honest and alive.
After the acquisition, Gibbs spent time as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Third Rock Ventures. It was there that he encountered the work that became his next operating chapter. Asher Biotherapeutics had been founded by scientists including Ivana Djuretic and Andy Yeung around a method called cis-targeting. The idea was to engineer an immunotherapy to engage two receptors on the same cell, directing its activity toward a chosen immune-cell type with more precision.
Gibbs's reaction was personal in the professional sense. The platform pulled his early training in protein engineering back into view. He called the idea elegant and saw upside in its specificity. This was not a founder origin story retrofitted with destiny. It was a translator recognizing a familiar grammar in a new sentence.
Learning to finance a sequence
Gibbs became Asher's CEO in September 2020. The company raised a $55 million Series A in 2021, followed less than six months later by a $108 million Series B. In 2024 came a $55 million Series C. Each round corresponded to a different claim about the platform: first that the mechanism deserved a company, then that the pipeline deserved acceleration, then that early clinical work justified the next stage.
His public comments from those years reveal an operator who speaks in milestones rather than inevitabilities. In a 2021 interview, he said Asher wanted to advance its lead programs “as far as we can ourselves,” while leaving room for combinations, regional partnerships and work beyond the leadership team's core oncology expertise. That is a small sentence with a full financing strategy inside it. Preserve control where the team has an edge. Stay open where another organization can add reach.
The same pattern appeared when the Series C closed. Gibbs thanked the investors, but he also thanked the team for generating the data behind the round and the clinical-trial participants for their trust. Capital was presented as an output of evidence and participation, not as the story's main character.
Asher also offered a glimpse of Gibbs as a steward rather than a founder claiming borrowed mythology. He explained publicly that the company's name came from a Hebrew word meaning happy or blessed, chosen by its founders to evoke the restoration of joy. His place in that story was to help the idea mature without rewriting where it began.
The boards around the operating job
Alongside full-time roles, Gibbs accumulated a second education in governance. He served on Tobira Therapeutics' board from 2013 to 2016 and Aridis Pharmaceuticals' board from 2015 to 2023. He was a trustee for the Northern California region of The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society from 2020 to 2023. Today he is also chairman of Inipharm, a clinical-stage company pursuing genetically defined targets with small molecules.
Boards change the angle of view. An executive lives inside today's constraints. A director has to ask whether the plan, team and capital still fit the evidence. Repeated exposure to both seats can sharpen a useful instinct: when to press for speed, when to preserve optionality and when a clean story has outrun the data beneath it.
Biotech momentum is not motion for its own sake. It is credible evidence arriving in an order the organization can survive.The pattern across Gibbs's operating career
Why Vivace fits the arc
Vivace brings Gibbs back to small molecules and a company whose scientific thesis can be drawn as a pathway. The Hippo system helps regulate growth and tissue size. When parts of it malfunction, YAP and TEAD proteins can help drive abnormal cell growth. VT3989 is designed to interfere with that signaling relationship by blocking a modification on TEAD proteins.
The program has moved beyond diagrams. A 2025 update from a Phase I/II study described 172 enrolled participants, including 135 with refractory mesothelioma. Among 22 mesothelioma participants treated at optimized dose levels, seven had partial responses and 12 had stable disease, for a reported disease-control rate of 86 percent. The FDA granted the program orphan drug designation in June 2025, and it has also received fast-track designation for a defined mesothelioma setting. These are development markers, not approval.
Vivace had already raised a $35 million Series D in March 2025, bringing its reported funding to $105 million. That means Gibbs did not arrive to invent the premise or rescue an empty pipeline. He arrived after scientists, clinicians, participants, investors and the prior leadership team had carried the program through several gates. His job is the next handoff.
That handoff will ask for every language he has learned. The molecular story must remain precise. The clinical plan must turn a signal into a test. The financing must match the trial, not the fantasy. The board must see around corners. A small team must make large-company decisions without the cushion of a large-company balance sheet.
There is a temptation to describe a varied résumé as eclectic. Gibbs's is more coherent than that. Protein engineering taught him to care about specificity. Gilead taught him how functions connect across a drug's life. Forty Seven taught him how an emerging oncology company builds institutional value. Asher asked him to finance a platform through successive proofs. Board work forced him to look at companies from outside the operating rhythm. Vivace gathers those lessons into one compact assignment.
The long view of a translator
Gibbs has published more than 50 scientific articles and is named on three issued patents. Those facts anchor him to a technical past, but his public identity is now that of a builder of teams and sequences. The personality visible in his remarks is measured: credit the scientists, acknowledge the people who make trials possible, describe the next milestone, leave room for partnership.
The broader lesson is useful beyond biotech. Translation is not simplification. Done well, it preserves what matters as an idea moves into a new room. The molecular biologist cannot give the investor every assay. The investor cannot give the team unlimited time. The commercial strategist cannot pretend a future market is already known. Someone has to keep the chain intact without pretending uncertainty has disappeared.
That has been Gibbs's recurring work. Not the solitary flash at the bench, and not the transaction announced at the end, but the connective labor in between. At Vivace, the pathway is different and the company is new to him. The operating question is familiar: what must be true next, who needs to prove it, and how does the organization earn enough time to find out?