He reviewed drugs at the FDA, ran safety operations at three of the biggest names in pharma, then built a clinical-research company of his own that now spans three continents. On the side, he wrote a novel.
Most people who run a contract research organization learned the rules from the outside. John Balian learned them from the desk where they were enforced. Before any of the corner offices, he sat inside the U.S. Food & Drug Administration as a medical reviewer for neuropharmacology products, and later as an Associate Director in the Office of Clinical Pharmacology and Biopharmaceutics. He saw which applications survived and which fell apart.
Today he is CEO, International of ClinChoice, the full-service global CRO he co-founded. The company shepherds drugs, biologics, medical devices and consumer-health products through the clinical process for pharma and biotech clients, with operations reaching across the United States, Europe and Southeast Asia. He leads the international side of a business that employs roughly four thousand people and that, in 2023, swallowed the Italian-rooted CRO CROMSOURCE to widen its global map.
A CRO is the invisible machinery behind a medicine. When a drugmaker doesn't want to build a trial apparatus from scratch, it hands the work to a company like ClinChoice: data management, regulatory affairs, pharmacovigilance, the slow grind of turning a molecule into something a regulator will sign off on. It is unglamorous and enormously consequential, and Balian has spent his career on every side of it - reviewer, safety chief, consultant, founder, CEO.
Everyone has a book hidden inside. Gray Wolves and White Doves is clearly the one I needed to release from within me.
- John Balian, on why he became a novelistAfter the FDA, Balian moved into industry and kept being handed the part of the job nobody volunteers for: keeping patients safe. At Bristol-Myers Squibb he led the Global Pharmacovigilance & Epidemiology group and the Medical Affairs group. At Pfizer he spent roughly a decade in senior roles, including VP and Global Head for Clinical Safety and Risk Management, and eventually Senior Vice President for Worldwide Safety & Regulatory Operations - the person accountable when a global drug portfolio has to answer for itself.
Then came Johnson & Johnson, where he served as Chief Medical Officer of the J&J Family of Consumer Companies before being named Chief R&D Operations Officer in 2014. That is the consumer-health empire - the products in millions of bathroom cabinets - and he owned the medical, clinical, regulatory, safety and toxicology functions behind them.
Here is the detail that complicates the tidy corporate timeline: he co-founded ClinChoice back in 1995, long before the J&J chapter. The company existed in parallel to the big-pharma career. In 2016 he started MediVista Consulting to advise healthcare and IT companies on transformative technology, and in 2018 he stepped fully into the CEO seat at the CRO he had helped start more than two decades earlier. The side project became the main act.
Balian is widely published in scientific journals, which is what you'd expect from a physician who spent years at the FDA. What you would not expect is the second byline. He is a published novelist, and his debut is not a beach read about a charming doctor. It is a largely autobiographical thriller set against one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century.
He attended Columbia University on a full scholarship and took his medical degree at Tufts University School of Medicine. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Armenian Center at Columbia University - a thread that runs straight into the book he eventually wrote.
His first novel is told through the eyes of a young boy trying to make sense of the world while growing up under repressive conditions in Western Armenia and Eastern Turkey in the 1960s and 70s. The journey runs from a remote village in Anatolia, to a dark basement in Istanbul, to the little-known Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, through Bavaria and Sweden, and finally to Paris.
It is a quest for identity and belonging, threaded against the long shadow of the Armenian Genocide. Reviewers found it laced with intrigue, betrayal, ancient tradition and even comic relief - carried by a protagonist with an indomitable will to live in freedom and dignity. It carries a roughly 4.0-star rating on Goodreads.
The craft detail tells you who wrote it: Balian deliberately chose character names with hidden Armenian and Turkish meanings, leaving a second layer for any reader willing to dig. He wanted non-Armenian readers to feel the history through story - never through a lecture.
He is both a published scientist and a published novelist - two byline lives in one career.
He knows the FDA from the inside. He reviewed drugs there before he ever sat across the table from it.
His debut novel is largely autobiographical, tracing a boy's path across Anatolia, Istanbul, Jerusalem and Europe.
He went to Columbia University on a full scholarship, then to Tufts for his M.D.
The company he runs as CEO is the same one he co-founded in 1995 - it outlasted his stints at Pfizer and J&J.
He serves on the Board of Directors of the Armenian Center at Columbia University.