James Posada has spent most of his professional life studying messages that are easy to miss. Early on, the messages were biochemical: a chain of proteins switching one another on inside a cell. Later, they arrived in conference rooms, where an experiment had to become a program, a partnership, or a company. Today, at Resolve Therapeutics, they circulate as fragments of RNA, small pieces of information with consequences far beyond their size.
It is tempting to describe this as a collection of reinventions. The record suggests something more coherent. Posada learned how to read a signal at the bench, then kept increasing the size of the system around it. A laboratory became an R&D group. A technical platform became a deal. A scientific hypothesis became a company that has survived long enough to test, publish, patent, regroup, and test again.
That continuity is the interesting part. Biotech biographies are often written as ladders: degree, fellowship, title, exit, founder. Posada's looks more like a circuit. Knowledge moves through it, meets resistance, changes form, and returns with new information.
The first signal
Posada earned a Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Vermont, then completed NIH postdoctoral training at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. There, his work contributed to the identification of ERK2, one of the early mitogen-activated protein kinases, and to mapping the activation pathway above it. MAP kinase is now familiar terrain in cell biology. At the time, the wiring was still being drawn.
The task demanded a particular kind of patience: isolate an event, prove its place in a sequence, and resist confusing correlation for command. A cell contains a riot of activity. Finding the pathway means learning which noise deserves attention.
One method, four scales
He carried that work back to Vermont as a tenure-track assistant professor. His laboratory studied MAP kinases and cell signaling with NIH support. The official biography is spare on campus detail, but the shape of the job is clear: establish a research question, win backing for it, recruit people, and make the work reproducible. Years before founding a company, he was already assembling a small institution around an uncertain result.
His publication record grew from that foundation. ORCID lists 25 works; Resolve says he has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed papers. The subjects evolved, but the fascination with signaling remained. Academic titles eventually gave way to an operating role at Eli Lilly, inside its therapeutic-proteins organization. Posada had direct responsibility for R&D scientists and led discovery projects from an initial idea toward a clinical candidate.
A career does not need one job description. It needs a question durable enough to survive several of them.YesPress
The deal is another experiment
Moving from a university lab to a large pharmaceutical company changes the unit of measurement. A discovery is no longer judged only by whether it is true. It has to be developable, differentiated, fundable, and legible to people with very different expertise. Posada learned that larger grammar at Lilly. Then he moved to GlycoFi, a Dartmouth spinout engineering yeast to produce humanized therapeutic proteins.
At GlycoFi, his title sat in business and market development, later described as chief business officer. The science remained close. He structured collaborations with Eli Lilly and Merck, turning a specialized protein-engineering platform into something larger companies could evaluate and use. In 2006, Merck acquired GlycoFi. Posada's official biography credits him with helping lead the process.
There is a useful founder lesson in that chapter. Technical value does not announce itself. Someone has to make the mechanism understandable without flattening it, then design a transaction that respects both the evidence and its uncertainty. The work resembles experimental design: define what each party contributes, decide what success looks like, and specify what happens next.
After GlycoFi, Posada founded Posada & Associates, a consultancy intended to give early-stage life-sciences companies experienced dealmaking and business leadership. This was not a retreat from building. It was a close look at the recurring failure points: a promising company that cannot frame a partnership, a technical team that lacks commercial fluency, or a strategy that runs ahead of its evidence.
Resolve, slowly
Resolve Therapeutics began in 2010 as a University of Washington spinout. The company was first based in Seattle and is now headquartered in Miami. Its founding thesis centered on intervening upstream in inflammatory signaling. Instead of merely addressing messages farther down a cascade, Resolve would investigate whether harmful extracellular nucleic acids could be removed closer to their source.
The company's lead work uses engineered nucleases, enzymes designed to digest particular nucleic-acid material while circulating in the body. The scientific details are complex, but the strategic instinct is recognizable from Posada's earlier work: locate the signal that organizes the rest of the system, then design around it.
Resolve raised $5.8 million in 2012 to advance its early program. What followed was not a neat sequence of triumphs. Drug development rarely offers one. It offered studies, publications, intellectual property, data that sharpened later questions, and the repeated work of maintaining a company while evidence accumulated. Posada appears as an author on Resolve clinical papers and as an inventor on patents covering engineered nuclease fusions. A 2024 patent names him among the inventors of optimized binuclease fusions.
The name Resolve has aged well. It can mean determination, but it also means making something clearer. The company has had to do both. Its work sits in a field where biological material can be fragile, transient, and hard to characterize. Persistence without better measurement would be stubbornness. Better measurement without persistence would remain a paper.
Back to RNA
Recent collaborations have widened the lens again. In 2025, Resolve began working with Duke School of Medicine on an observational study of cell-free RNA after severe injury. Later that year, Posada presented the company's platform at an international symposium on circulating nucleic acids in Hong Kong.
In April 2026, Resolve announced a collaboration with Institut Pasteur de Montevideo and B4-RNA. The partnership uses REJOIN-seq, a method developed to recover and sequence extracellular RNA fragments that conventional approaches can miss. Posada described embedding the technology within Resolve's programs as an opportunity to advance the understanding of cell-free RNA. He praised Juan Tosar's team for careful, exacting science. It was a scientist's compliment: precision first.
Embedding Pasteur's next generation RNA-seq technology within Resolve's clinical programs provides a unique opportunity to significantly advance our understanding of cfRNA.James Posada, April 2026
The collaboration makes Posada's career feel almost circular. His earliest work clarified a pathway by identifying its components and their order. Now his company is trying to see molecular fragments that have been hiding in plain sight. Better detection can produce a better map; a better map can change the intervention.
He is also still doing the outward-facing work. In 2026, he appeared on the program for the ChinaBio Partnering Forum in Shanghai. The scientist who became a dealmaker has not had to choose between the two. In a small biotech company, both identities report for duty.
The founder as translator
Posada's public record does not offer much domestic mythology or founder folklore. It offers work: papers, patents, transactions, trials, and collaborations. This makes him less suited to the familiar cult-of-personality profile and more useful as an operating case study.
His range is not decorative. Each chapter appears to solve a limitation exposed by the last. Academic science supplied depth but not a development machine. Pharma supplied scale but not founder control. GlycoFi supplied company-building and a transaction. Consulting exposed the needs of many early teams. Resolve combined the pieces, along with all their complications.
The transferable skill is translation. A founder in deep biotech translates between the molecule and the balance sheet, between a publication and a patent, between a collaborator's specialty and the company's central thesis. Poor translation introduces noise. Good translation preserves the important detail while making coordinated action possible.
Posada's long view matters too. Resolve is older than many companies that have launched, raised, rebranded, and disappeared during its life. Longevity alone proves little. Longevity joined to continuing publications, patents, presentations, and new research relationships says something more precise: the original question has kept earning another experiment.
There is an appealing modesty to that standard. Do not demand that a career resolve into one immaculate breakthrough. Ask whether the work becomes clearer, whether the tools improve, whether the next partnership makes the question more answerable. The signal can be faint. The job is to keep improving the receiver.