She walks into a company mid-restructure, finds a deal that's quietly strangling its pipeline, and renegotiates it from scratch. That's the first thing Diana Peng Bockus did at NGM Biopharmaceuticals. The second thing - four years later - was becoming CEO.
Bockus joined NGM in November 2020 as the company's head of business development and alliance management. Within months, she had restructured a sprawling partnership with Merck that had effectively outsourced control of NGM's most promising programs. The restructuring returned ownership of the company's entire portfolio - spanning cardiovascular and metabolic disease, ophthalmology, and oncology - to NGM. It was the kind of deal negotiation that rarely gets a headline but changes everything.
She didn't arrive at NGM to run it. She arrived to fix what nobody else had fixed.
YesPress Analysis • May 2026The Road to South San Francisco
Before NGM, Bockus spent years on both sides of the biotech equation. She started at Bain & Company as a management consultant, working with pharmaceutical and biotech clients. The vantage point was useful: she saw how these companies planned, how they mis-planned, and where strategy and science failed to speak the same language. That translation problem would define her career.
From Bain, she moved to RefleXion Medical - a medical technology company building radiopharmaceutical delivery systems - as Senior Director of Strategy and Business Development. There, she focused on pharmaceutical partnerships, learning the mechanics of how biotech companies negotiate with large pharma when they need capital but don't want to surrender control. The lesson would prove directly applicable.
Bockus earned a Bachelor's degree in Human Biology and a second in Sociology from Stanford University, then went to The Wharton School for her MBA. She later served on the Executive Board of the Wharton Healthcare Management Alumni Association. The dual degree in biology and social science is less unusual for a biotech CEO than it sounds: understanding diseases and understanding how people experience them are different skills, and most executives only have one.
NGM Bio: Biology-First, Rare-First
NGM Biopharmaceuticals was built on a single conviction: that rigorous, curiosity-driven biology - not market forecasting - is the best way to find drugs that actually work. Co-founded by Jin-Long Chen, the company developed a discovery platform designed to identify biological targets before the rest of the industry noticed them. That approach produced programs in liver disease, oncology, metabolic disorders, and ophthalmology that nobody else was running.
The company went public on NASDAQ under the ticker NGM. Then the market turned. In February 2024, NGM entered into a definitive merger agreement with The Column Group - a San Francisco-based life sciences venture firm with a long track record in biology-first drug development. The deal closed in April 2024, taking NGM private at $1.55 per share and giving it the flexibility to move quickly without the quarterly-earnings pressure of public markets.
Three months after going private, NGM raised $122 million in a Series A financing led by The Column Group. The funding was targeted at two specific programs: a registrational trial of aldafermin in primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), a rare and progressive inflammatory disease of the bile ducts, and a Phase 2 trial of NGM120 in hyperemesis gravidarum - severe pregnancy nausea that affects around 2% of pregnant people and for which there is no approved, mechanism-targeted treatment.
The Pipeline Worth Watching
In February 2025, NGM dosed the first participant in the EMERALD trial of NGM120 for hyperemesis gravidarum. It was a milestone that reflected something specific about how Bockus thinks about target selection: the conditions she's chosen to chase are common enough to matter clinically but rare enough that they've been ignored by the industry. PSC affects roughly 1 in 10,000 people. Severe pregnancy nausea is orders of magnitude more common but still largely untreated by mechanism-targeted drugs.
The GDF15/GFRAL pathway is one of the more fascinating threads in modern biology - it connects nausea during pregnancy to wasting in cancer to metabolic regulation. NGM is pulling that thread in multiple directions at once.
YesPress Analysis • May 2026The CEO Appointment
In April 2025, Diana Peng Bockus was appointed Chief Executive Officer of NGM Biopharmaceuticals, succeeding David J. Woodhouse, Ph.D. The timing was deliberate: clinical trials were underway, the company's strategy had been refined through the take-private process, and the business infrastructure Bockus had helped build over four years was in place. She didn't inherit a clean slate or a victory lap - she inherited an active clinical-stage biotech with a biology-first ethos and a small team that needed to execute.
For a company that talks about doing things differently - in-house biology, first-in-class targets, unmet-need focus - the choice of a CEO with deep business development experience but genuine scientific fluency is coherent. Bockus can read a term sheet and read a mechanism. That combination is rarer than it sounds in biotech, where the gulf between science and business often runs wide and deep.
Career Timeline
Key Achievements
- Appointed Chief Executive Officer of NGM Biopharmaceuticals in April 2025
- Restructured the Merck alliance - returned control of NGM's full pipeline to the company
- Supported $122M Series A financing led by The Column Group in July 2024
- Drove strategic repositioning of NGM following the 2024 take-private transaction
- Oversaw initiation of EMERALD Phase 2 trial of NGM120 for hyperemesis gravidarum
- Served on the Executive Board of the Wharton Healthcare Management Alumni Association