In 2019, David Hallal and Mike Paglia appeared in a photograph inside an empty warehouse. There were no gleaming production suites to admire. The space outside Boston was still becoming something. Hallal had already been chief executive of Alexion Pharmaceuticals; Paglia had led manufacturing work elsewhere. Here they were, standing in the gap between a business proposition and its plumbing.
Both were University of New Hampshire graduates. Hallal belonged to the class of 1988 and had studied psychology. Paglia had earned his graduate degree in biochemistry and molecular biology in 2002. They had not met at university. Their connection arrived later, through work. It is a useful opening scene for Hallal: a commercial executive beside a technical operator, contemplating a very large room.
The company was ElevateBio, formed in late 2017 by Hallal, Mitchell Finer, and Vikas Sinha. Its public launch came in May 2019. Hallal’s wager concerned a stubborn business problem. Young companies could have promising research and still lack the facilities, specialist teams, and manufacturing processes required to build a dependable enterprise. Each company assembling everything from scratch would be an expensive form of repetition.
ElevateBio proposed centralizing much of that work. Its BaseCamp operation would provide shared capabilities to portfolio companies and selected outside partners. The name was well chosen. Expeditions tend to get the romantic paintings; the place that stores the equipment is rather less celebrated. Hallal was helping turn that second place into a business.
A psychology degree, then the commercial ladder
Hallal’s route into the industry ran through commercial operations. His early employers included Upjohn, Amgen, Biogen, and OSI Eyetech. The sequence matters because his later company would depend on joining disciplines that often occupy separate departments. He had spent his career on the side responsible for turning an organization’s work into a functioning operation with customers, teams, and geographic reach.
His psychology degree is an appealing detail, but it should remain a detail. It does not explain every decision he subsequently made. What it establishes is that his professional authority came through a different route from that of a laboratory-trained founder. At ElevateBio, he built alongside Finer’s scientific experience and Sinha’s financial experience. Three founders gave the undertaking more than one professional vocabulary.
Alexion hired Hallal in June 2006 to build and lead its American commercial operations. He progressed through broader responsibilities, became chief operating officer in September 2014, and succeeded founder Leonard Bell as chief executive on April 1, 2015. Bell had held the top job for 23 years. Hallal was taking over an established founder’s company after helping construct its commercial organization.
The scale changed substantially during his decade there. Alexion developed a 50-country operating platform and exceeded $3 billion in annual revenue by 2016. Those are company outcomes produced by many people. Hallal’s part was building and leading commercial infrastructure, then assuming wider operating responsibility. His career had moved from managing a function to being answerable for the whole machine.
The interruption in the résumé
The Alexion chapter ended abruptly. Hallal and Sinha left in December 2016 while an internal investigation into sales practices was underway. Alexion said Hallal resigned for personal reasons. The timing belongs in the account of his career, alongside the expansion and promotions. A neat succession of titles would give a tidier story than the record allows.
By late 2017, the two executives were working together again, this time with Finer. That continuity is one of the more revealing facts about ElevateBio’s formation. The new venture did not begin with strangers collecting business cards. It included people who had already worked inside the same large organization and would now attempt to create a different kind of one.
There is no need to invent a private moment of revelation to make the transition interesting. The change in business model supplies its own drama. At Alexion, Hallal had helped expand a company’s operating reach. At ElevateBio, he and his co-founders were constructing capabilities that multiple companies could use. His experience with scale was becoming part of what the new company offered.
One roof, many enterprises
The public launch arrived with a $150 million Series A financing. That money supported a model with a considerable physical commitment: BaseCamp would combine research, process development, and manufacturing expertise. The company was selling access to people and infrastructure as well as participating in the creation of other businesses. It was an unusually literal interpretation of putting the foundations first.
A further $170 million Series B followed in March 2020. The financing was intended, in part, to support completion of the BaseCamp platform. Then came the $525 million Series C in March 2021. The progression describes how much capital an infrastructure-centered proposition can absorb before anyone should confuse it with a lightweight business assembled from laptops and a pleasing slide deck.
The Waltham facility occupied 140,000 square feet. In 2021, the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering gave BaseCamp its Facility of the Year category award for Operational Excellence. The details behind that recognition included adaptable laboratories, shared development and manufacturing modules, integrated information systems, and quality assurance. These are the organizational particulars that rarely make a founder sound glamorous. They are also the particulars on which a shared facility depends.
There is a practical tension inside the model. Shared infrastructure has to accommodate different partners without making every project an exception that overwhelms the system. Flexibility and consistency must coexist. The award recognized work on that operating problem, giving the BaseCamp idea a more tangible test than a fundraising announcement could provide.
In June 2021, ElevateBio announced a five-year collaboration with Boston Children’s Hospital that included opportunities to form companies and provide access to manufacturing capabilities. The arrangement extended Hallal’s central proposition into an academic setting. Research institutions could contribute discoveries; ElevateBio could contribute the facilities and operating expertise needed to carry development forward.
Capital is only the beginning
By May 2023, ElevateBio announced another $401 million in Series D funding. It also said it had added more than 15 biopharmaceutical partners across its ecosystem during the preceding year. Those announcements measure different things. Investors supplied resources to build the platform. Partners supplied occasions to put it to work. A company built around shared capabilities needs both.
The business had also acquired Life Edit in 2021, expanding its technology holdings. BaseCamp and Life Edit became complementary parts of the organization: manufacturing and process development on one side, proprietary technology and research capabilities on the other. Hallal’s commercial background appears relevant here. A facility can earn service revenue; a technology platform can support licensing and research partnerships. Combining them creates several ways to work with another company.
His public description of the strategy could be succinct. In a 2021 interview, he framed the aim as “better, faster, cheaper.” The phrase is almost aggressively unpoetic. That is part of its usefulness. It gives an elaborate organizational design three ordinary tests, each of which a partner can reasonably ask about.
“better, faster, cheaper”
David Hallal · 2021
In his January 2023 reflection on ElevateBio’s first five years, Hallal wrote about further partnerships, geographic expansion, and a profitability goal. The ambition extended beyond collecting technologies. He wanted the assembled organization to become useful enough, often enough, to sustain a business. That distinction matters whenever a venture has raised substantial money: financing establishes capacity to try; operations determine what the capacity is worth.
The founder moves to another chair
On April 28, 2025, Hallal’s responsibilities changed in two places. ElevateBio announced his transition from chairman and CEO to executive chairman. Scholar Rock appointed him chief executive, adding that responsibility to the chairmanship he had held since 2017. The move brought him back into daily leadership of a public company while preserving his involvement in the business he had co-founded.
Scholar Rock also appointed Sinha as chief financial officer and Keith Woods as chief operating officer, alongside Akshay Vaishnaw as president of research and development. Familiar operating relationships were appearing again. Leadership teams have their own accumulated working knowledge: an understanding of how colleagues allocate responsibility, communicate, and make decisions. Hallal’s career repeatedly puts experienced collaborators back in the same room.
At ElevateBio, Ger Brophy became interim CEO in May 2025. Christopher Murphy succeeded him in January 2026. Hallal remained executive chairman, with a remit covering strategic, financial, and operational priorities. Founding a company and overseeing its next phase are different assignments. The transition placed the daily management of ElevateBio with another executive while Hallal retained a formal role in its direction.
The company’s January 2026 operating update reported six consecutive years of revenue growth and a 98 percent manufacturing batch success rate. Those were company-reported figures, describing the organization across a period that included the leadership handover. They bring the story back to the warehouse. The proposition had acquired facilities, teams, partners, and measurable operating results.
Manufacturing batch success rate reported by ElevateBio in its January 2026 business update.
The enduring interest in Hallal’s career lies in that passage from an empty space to an institution other people can use. The psychology graduate became a commercial leader, then a chief executive, then a co-founder investing in shared infrastructure. He now holds another chief executive’s job while helping oversee ElevateBio. The recurring question is concrete enough to resist a grand slogan: who will assemble the people and equipment so the work can actually happen?