She does not discover the molecule. She builds the machine that gets it to the patient.
Commercial leadership · TerSera Therapeutics · Since the company existed only on paper, 2016
In 2016, TerSera Therapeutics was an idea and a name. There were no products on shelves, no oncology business unit, no quarterly sales-based payments flowing to anyone. Heidi Gillmore joined at that blank-slate moment and never left. Nearly a decade later, she has held a string of commercial leadership roles at the Deerfield, Illinois company, moving across marketing, strategy, corporate communications and the running of TerSera's US Oncology Business Unit.
The company's pitch is unusual in an industry obsessed with pipelines: TerSera markets what it calls "one-and-only therapeutics," medicines with untapped potential that larger firms have either overlooked or chosen to let go. The flagship example is Zoladex, the prostate and breast cancer implant TerSera acquired the US and Canadian commercial rights to from AstraZeneca in 2017. Acquiring a drug is the easy part. Keeping it growing, supported, reimbursed and in the hands of the right patients is the harder work. That is the work Gillmore has spent her career doing.
Her title has shifted over the years - Senior Vice President for strategy and corporate marketing, general manager of specialty products and commercial excellence, general manager of the US oncology unit. The through-line is constant: she is the person who turns a therapy into a business.
Before the oncology units and orphan drugs, there was supply chain consulting. Gillmore started her career at Arthur Andersen, working in the firm's supply chain technology services practice inside its business consulting division. It is an unglamorous origin for a pharmaceutical executive, and a revealing one. The discipline of moving products through complex systems, of making logistics and incentives line up, is exactly the discipline that specialty pharma rewards.
From consulting she moved into the industry itself, taking on marketing, market access and business development roles at TAP Pharmaceuticals and Takeda Pharmaceuticals North America. At Takeda she became Senior Director and Global Brand Lead for the Gout Franchise - her first time owning a therapeutic area end to end.
Then came Crealta Pharmaceuticals, where she served as Vice President of Marketing from 2014. When Horizon Pharma acquired Crealta in an all-cash deal worth roughly $510 million in early 2016, Gillmore had lived through the full arc of a specialty pharma asset: build it, market it, sell the company. Months later, she was building TerSera.
A Bachelor of Arts from the University of Northern Iowa, and a graduate credential in health administration and policy from the University of Chicago.
Marketing, market access, business development and general management. She has worked all four of the functions that decide whether a drug succeeds commercially.
A biopharmaceutical company that acquires, develops and markets specialty medicines in select therapeutic areas - oncology, rare disease, non-opioid pain and more. The model is to find therapies with untapped potential and wrap them in the comprehensive support patients actually need.
Headquartered at 520 Lake Cook Road in Deerfield, Illinois, with roughly 220 employees, TerSera was named a Great Place to Work in both 2024 and 2025. Its best-known asset, Zoladex, came over from AstraZeneca in 2017 for an upfront payment of $250 million plus future milestones.
Her career started in supply chain technology consulting. The instinct for making systems and incentives line up never went away.
She has worked across rheumatology, gout, oncology and rare disease - some of the most reimbursement-complex markets in medicine.
She lived through a $510M acquisition at Crealta, then turned around and helped build the next company from nothing.
Nearly a decade at one company is rare in pharma. She has stayed at TerSera since the day it had no products at all.
Compiled from public sources including LinkedIn, iBIO, AstraZeneca, FiercePharma and TerSera Therapeutics. Career details reflect publicly reported roles and may have changed since publication. No private or health information is included.