The first useful clue in Jeremy Gowler’s career is not the chief executive title. It is the sales territory. In 2002, armed with a biology and environmental studies degree and a marketing diploma, he joined Novartis as a medical representative. The work began at the point where science stops being a slide deck and starts meeting the world: calendars, customers, budgets, skepticism, and all. Twenty-two years later, Gowler took charge of Ophirex, a California biotechnology company built around a similarly practical question. If a snakebite happens far from a hospital, can treatment begin where the bite happens?
It is a question about a molecule, certainly. It is also about distance. Ophirex is developing varespladib, an investigational small-molecule inhibitor intended to work across venom from many snake species. The company’s target format is an oral, portable treatment that can be taken early, before a patient reaches equipped care. The scientific proposition belongs to Ophirex’s founders and research team. Gowler’s assignment is the complicated middle: development, regulation, manufacturing, partnerships, commercialization, and access.
His résumé has been preparing him for that middle with almost suspicious neatness. Sales led to marketing, medical affairs, operations, and international leadership. Vaccines led to biopharmaceuticals. Private companies led to a public one. A commercial post led to the chief operating officer’s desk and, briefly, the interim CEO chair. Gowler did not found Ophirex, and he does not pretend to have done so. He arrived when the company needed an operator who could take an existing scientific case and turn it into a sequence of next moves.
“Nothing has really changed in how snakebites have been treated for over 100 years. Our goal is to change that now.”Jeremy Gowler, Ophirex CEO and Board Director
A career assembled from both ends
Gowler’s education reads like a compact theory of technical business. At the University of Victoria, he took a double major in biology and environmental studies. At the British Columbia Institute of Technology, he studied marketing management. One credential taught him to parse living systems. The other taught him to think about markets, positioning, and adoption. His career kept both halves in view.
At Novartis, Gowler moved through roles in sales, marketing, medical affairs, and operations, working in Canada, the United States, and Switzerland. In 2014 he joined PaxVax, a private-equity-backed vaccine company, as vice president of global commercial. He helped build its commercial organization through the period that ended with Emergent BioSolutions acquiring PaxVax in 2018. Gowler stayed with the vaccines business under its new owner, again leading global commercial work.
Jeremy Gowler’s operating apprenticeship
In 2020, he moved to Sandoz as global head of commercial for its biopharmaceutical business. The job included late-stage launch planning and commercialization across a global portfolio. By December 2022 he was at Invivyd, overseeing operations and commercial activities as chief operating and commercial officer. In April 2024, the board named him interim CEO during a leadership transition. He left the executive team at the end of May, after a short stint that placed all the functions he had accumulated under one title.
The product is also a clock
Ophirex announced Gowler as CEO and a board director in July 2024. His public comments from the appointment were strikingly logistical. He emphasized remote and underserved regions, the difficulty of reaching existing treatment, and the potential for an oral therapy to be used before arrival at a facility. In other words, he described the product through its place in a journey.
That framing suits an operator. A field treatment has to survive a more unruly environment than a clinic: uncertain species, variable travel time, limited equipment, and the simple fact that emergencies do not consult a launch plan. Portability is not packaging decoration. Oral dosing is not merely convenient. Both are part of the product logic.
The strategy also has to work on paper before it can work in the field. In December 2025, Ophirex said the US Food and Drug Administration agreed that development of varespladib for human snakebite could proceed under the agency’s Animal Rule, a pathway used when conventional efficacy studies in people are not ethical or feasible. The company also reported an FDA designation supporting its veterinary program in dogs. Gowler presented the parallel human and animal pathways as related parts of the same operating problem.
Partnerships as a form of speed
A CEO can treat partnerships as announcements or as instruments. Under Gowler, Ophirex’s February 2026 agreement with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine was plainly the latter. Ophirex agreed to supply marimastat, an inhibitor aimed at another major class of venom toxins, for the school’s TOCSINS clinical trial. The work complements Ophirex’s varespladib program and places the company inside a broader research effort rather than behind a velvet rope.
Gowler described the collaboration as part of a fundamental shift toward oral treatments that can be carried or given in rural clinics. The revealing word is collaboration. No single company controls the science, the trial network, the regulatory route, the supply chain, and the many places a treatment might eventually travel. The route to access resembles a relay, with each institution carrying a different section.
That logic is visible in his board work too. Gowler serves as vice-chair of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, a University of Saskatchewan research center. Public annual reports place him on the board as far back as 2019, during years when his day job took him through Switzerland and the United States. The connection keeps him close to research infrastructure even as his executive work concentrates on commercialization.
The operator’s useful impatience
Gowler’s public language tends toward motion: advance, progress, enable, build. Even his more personal LinkedIn activity carries an operator’s preference for testing over inertia. In 2026, he supported a Vancouver proposal for autonomous delivery robots, writing that the city would always feel like home and praising a willingness to test new ideas thoughtfully. It was not a biotech post, but the logic was familiar. Let a practical experiment meet the real world, observe what happens, and improve from evidence.
There is restraint in his Ophirex role as well. The company describes varespladib as investigational. Its 2024 Phase 2 BRAVO study did not meet its primary endpoint, though the company reported a signal in a subgroup treated earlier. The response was not to decorate the result. Ophirex adjusted its development plan, pursued a different regulatory route, and continued additional studies. Useful impatience is not rushing the evidence. It is refusing to confuse a setback with the end of the sequence.
That may be the most transferable part of Gowler’s story. Technical companies often celebrate invention and underestimate translation. Yet someone must decide how evidence becomes a filing, how a filing becomes manufacturing, how manufacturing becomes distribution, and how distribution reaches a person or veterinarian with little time to spare. Each handoff can ruin the elegance of the step before it.
A treatment can be scientifically clever and still lose an argument with distance.The operating problem at the center of Ophirex
The next mile is the company
Gowler now leads a public benefit corporation, a legal structure that writes public purpose into corporate governance. That does not make the work simpler. It makes the tradeoffs harder to hide. A treatment aimed at remote settings must still have reliable evidence, a scalable supply, regulatory approval, and an economic model that does not exile the communities named in the mission.
His career gives him a useful view of those tensions. He has worked inside a global pharmaceutical company and venture-backed biotechs, before and after an acquisition, in private and public markets, and on both sides of the Atlantic. He has stood close to researchers, sales teams, regulators, and boards. The pattern is less about prestige than interfaces: one group handing difficult work to another without dropping it.
Ophirex’s immediate future will be determined by studies and regulatory decisions, not by biography. Still, biographies can explain why certain people are chosen for certain chapters. Gowler arrived after the founding insight and before the hoped-for field use. His task is to manage the distance between those points.
That distance is measured in years of development, but the product is designed around minutes. It is an unusually sharp reminder of what an operator does. Build patiently so that, one day, someone else may not have to wait.