Gary Glick has held jobs that are difficult to fit on the same business card. Chemistry professor. Company founder. Chief executive. Once, during his college years, ice cream truck driver. The last title probably came with the most agreeable customer expectations. A cone is a fairly legible deliverable.
His present working life is based in Boston, where he leads Odyssey Therapeutics. He also serves as interim CEO and executive chair at London-based CHARM. Scorpion Therapeutics, the company he co-founded in 2020, belongs to an earlier chapter. The names keep changing; the work of assembling an organization keeps returning.
There is a temptation to read that sequence backward, to see the professor as a founder awaiting the appropriate moment. It gives a biography the pleasing inevitability of a train timetable. Glick’s actual chronology is more interesting. He spent sixteen years on Michigan’s faculty before founding Lycera. His academic career had substance of its own. The companies followed, one decision at a time.
A useful way to understand him is to look at those decisions: the institutions he entered, the colleagues he gathered, the responsibilities he took on, and the moments when he began again. The result is a story with several beginnings and considerable work between them.
Sixteen years before the first company
Glick’s education took him from Rutgers to Columbia, where he completed a doctorate in organic chemistry in 1988 under W. Clark Still. He then worked in Jeremy R. Knowles’s laboratory at Harvard on an NIH postdoctoral fellowship. In 1990, he joined the chemistry faculty at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
That sequence contains a recognizable academic progression, but the length of the Michigan chapter deserves attention. He remained on the faculty until retiring at the end of 2016. Across those years, the university was a place to teach, conduct research and build something that could outlast a particular experiment.
16 years from faculty appointment to first company.
He founded Michigan’s Chemical Biology Doctoral Program, bringing together faculty across departments and units. A graduate program is an organizational achievement as well as an intellectual one. It makes a subject into a place people can enter, with colleagues to learn from and work to do together.
By his retirement, Michigan described a record of more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and 27 issued US patents. A later Aktis biography lists 54 issued US patents. These are counts from different points in a career, and they show why the academic years should remain visible in the company story. Glick had accumulated a substantial body of work before the later executive titles.
His honors include a Sloan fellowship, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award and an NSF Young Investigator Award. He is also an AAAS fellow. The list is useful chiefly for what it establishes: the science was an established career, with its own recognition and obligations, when entrepreneurship became part of his working life.
Lycera changes the working day
In 2006, Glick founded Lycera, drawing on research from his academic laboratory. He served first as president and then as chief scientific officer. The company recruited more than twenty specialists and raised over $40 million in equity financing. Three programs were partnered with Merck in agreements collectively valued at more than $600 million.
The change in scale is easy to see in the verbs. A professor publishes and teaches. A founder also recruits, raises money and negotiates. The same scientific background now has to work inside an organization whose existence depends on other people agreeing to join it and finance it.
Lycera overlapped with his faculty years. The first company therefore arrived before the university career ended. That matters because it makes the transition less theatrical and more plausible: two sets of responsibilities sharing a calendar, rather than one grand departure followed by a conveniently empty desk.
First Wave Bio and IFM followed. Glick was IFM’s CEO from 2015 through November 2019, then became executive chairman. IFM completed major transactions with Bristol Myers Squibb and Novartis. By this stage, beginning a company had become a recurring part of his career, with fresh teams and counterparties each time.
The job titles also began to vary. Founder, chief scientific officer, CEO and executive chairman carry different responsibilities. Treating them as interchangeable would flatten the story. Glick’s record is interesting because he has occupied several positions around an idea, from its scientific foundations to its financing and governance.
The founding year is its own kind of job
Scorpion began in February 2020. Glick was its co-founder and founding chief executive, serving until February 2021. During that tenure, the company grew to nearly fifty employees and raised $270 million across two financings. An early company with that many colleagues already has a working life beyond its founder.
A number in a financing announcement describes money committed to the organization. Headcount describes people whose days now depend on it. Put the two together and the founding year becomes easier to picture: resources to deploy, a team to coordinate, and a structure that must become useful quickly.
Glick’s departure from the CEO role did not conclude Scorpion’s history. Other executives carried the work forward. In January 2025, Lilly announced an agreement under which Scorpion shareholders could receive up to $2.5 billion, including an upfront payment and payments contingent on milestones. Lilly’s subsequent reporting dates the acquisition to March 2025.
Those dates keep the credit in proportion. Glick helped create and finance the early company. The later transaction came years after his CEO tenure and involved the work of subsequent leadership and colleagues. A founder can be consequential without personally directing every later event.
This is one of the more human features of company-building. You help establish something that eventually has meetings you do not attend, decisions you do not make, and a future with other people at its center. Scorpion continued. Glick had already moved toward another beginning.
During Glick’s founding CEO tenure, February 2020 - February 2021.
The room comes before the announcement
Odyssey grew out of Glick’s conversations with OrbiMed’s Carl Gordon in 2021. Incorporated that April, it publicly announced a $218 million Series A in December, led by OrbiMed and co-led by SR One. At its launch, the organization already had more than ninety scientists and staff.
The first hire was Shifeng Pan, who came from a chemistry leadership role at Novartis. Other early recruits included Robert Abraham, Natalie Dales and Joseph McDonald. Their backgrounds brought experience from organizations including Pfizer, Novartis, Bristol Myers Squibb and Celgene. The announcement described a new company; the people arrived with working histories.
Jeffrey Leiden figures in this chapter as both mentor and, later, Odyssey’s board chair. His advice to Glick had emphasized hiring experienced practitioners. It is an unglamorous principle beside the customary excitement of a launch, which is part of its appeal. A company gets to begin fresh. Its colleagues do not have to learn every lesson fresh.
Glick also chose to bring substantial capabilities inside Odyssey. In a 2021 interview, he explained that external partners were stretched thin and that internal capacity would help the company maintain its timelines. The explanation is practical: a plan depends partly on whose schedule controls the work.
By October 2022, Odyssey had roughly 160 employees and locations in Massachusetts, Ann Arbor and Frankfurt. That month, it announced a $168 million Series B led by General Catalyst. The geography joined Glick’s earlier academic city to an organization operating across several places. The finances made room for a larger working structure.
Asked about the company’s name at launch, Glick connected Odyssey with a journey and with his thirty years in bioscience. The reference is apt without requiring an epic. Most organizational journeys consist of decisions about colleagues, space, time and money. The interesting part is watching those decisions turn an intention into a place where people work.
“This is a culture of ‘can do,’ a culture of respect and a culture of trying to make a difference.”Gary D. Glick, Founder, President & CEO of Odyssey
A second chair, across the Atlantic
In June 2022, CHARM publicly launched with a $50 million Series A and named Glick executive chair. The London company was founded by David Baker and Laksh Aithani. Glick entered as an experienced scientist and company builder, alongside founders working with three-dimensional deep learning and molecular structures.
The combination extends his story into a different organizational setting. At Odyssey, he is the founder and chief executive. At CHARM, his initial role was to chair a company founded by others. The contribution is different, even when the underlying experience comes from the same career.
He became CHARM’s interim CEO in June 2025 and remains listed in that role, alongside executive chair. The word interim belongs in the description. It tells the reader something precise about the appointment, rather than turning every title into a permanent identity.
His advisory role at Aktis adds another form of participation. Here, the experience is available to a team he does not run. Taken together, the appointments show several ways a scientist can remain involved in building organizations: lead one, chair another, advise a third. The work has more than one seat.
A ticker and a footnote
Odyssey began trading on Nasdaq on May 8, 2026, under ODTX. Its initial public offering priced 15.5 million shares at $18 each, generating $279 million in gross IPO proceeds. A concurrent private placement added approximately $25 million. Including a later partial exercise of the underwriters’ option, the combined gross proceeds reached $314.8 million.
Each figure describes a particular transaction, before fees and expenses. The distinction is worth retaining because the public-company chapter brings a more exact vocabulary. Share counts, offering prices and closing dates become part of the organization’s daily record. On May 11, Glick signed its filing as president and CEO.
Another detail in that record is smaller and more personal. Glick elected to forgo any annual bonus he might otherwise receive for 2025 to support employee retention initiatives. The possible award was up to $226,355. His annual bonus for that year was zero.
The choice does not establish everything about the workplace. It does give the reader a concrete decision to place beside his public language about respect and shared effort. A company’s culture becomes easier to assess when there is an action attached to it. Here, keeping colleagues was the stated reason for an executive compensation decision.
Glick has described Odyssey as having a “culture of respect.” It is a modest phrase compared with the sums attached to his companies, and perhaps a useful one to end on. The organizations have names, investors and formal titles. Their work still depends on people choosing to spend their days together.
For Glick, the habit of beginning again has required more than another idea. It has required another roomful of colleagues, another arrangement of responsibilities, and another reason for people to join. The recurring achievement is the creation of those rooms. The next chapter has to be built with whoever walks in.