Michael
Bigham

Catching Up Mid-Stride

When Michael Bigham arrived at Paratek Pharmaceuticals in July 2014 as Chairman and CEO, the company was sitting on something unusual: a family of novel tetracycline antibiotics invented at Tufts University and backed by a Nobel Prize-winning founder, but not yet through the FDA's gate. Most executives would have treated that as a fundraising problem. Bigham treated it as a build problem.

He had done this before. Not the exact same thing, but the shape of it - taking a science-first company, raising the capital, building the team, pushing through the regulatory marathon, and commercializing the result. Gilead Sciences in its early days. Coulter Pharmaceuticals before the oncology merger. Avila Therapeutics from a blank check at Series A. Over three decades the pattern repeats, each time with slightly higher stakes.

Antibiotic resistance is not a photogenic crisis. It does not arrive with a wave or a wildfire. It accumulates quietly, bacterium by bacterium, as old drugs lose their grip. Bigham understood this well before it became a policy talking point. NUZYRA - the brand name for omadacycline - received FDA approval in October 2018, targeting community-acquired bacterial pneumonia (CABP) and acute bacterial skin infections (ABSSSI). It was the kind of win that takes a decade to manufacture.

In June 2019, Bigham handed the CEO role to Evan Loh, M.D., and moved into the Executive Chairman seat - a classic operator's transition, staying engaged without gripping the wheel. He remained Executive Chairman until 2023, when he closed that chapter entirely and turned his attention to Firebrand River Capital, the investment vehicle he founded in 2022.

Before Paratek - A Career in Three Acts

The first act was finance. Bigham graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.S. in Commerce (with distinction) and earned his CPA before heading to Stanford for his MBA. He joined Hambrecht & Quist - the San Francisco investment bank that financed the biotech revolution - eventually becoming Co-Head of Healthcare Investment Banking. This was the 1980s, when biotech was barely a category.

The second act was Gilead Sciences, where Bigham spent more than eight years as an early employee. He rose through the ranks to serve as both Executive Vice President of Operations and Chief Financial Officer. Gilead in those years was a scrappy antiviral startup in Foster City, California - not the $80 billion pharmaceutical titan it would later become. Bigham was there for the building, not the harvesting.

The third act layered investing and operating in ways that resisted a clean label. He led Coulter Pharmaceuticals as President and CEO before its merger into Corixa Corporation, where he became Vice Chairman. He joined Abingworth LLP - one of the oldest and most respected life sciences investment groups in the world - as General Partner in 2003, and remained active there for over twelve years. In 2007, he took the Founding Chairman and CEO role at Avila Therapeutics during its Series A financing, personally hiring much of the early management team.

The Antibiotic Resistance Case

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bigham became one of the clearer voices on the intersection of viral infection and bacterial co-morbidity. He argued that secondary bacterial infections accompanying COVID-19 represented a genuine therapeutic gap - and that NUZYRA was positioned to fill part of it. He also called for more systematic pandemic stockpiling: not just ventilators and PPE, but the antibiotics likely to be needed when viral illness opens the door to bacterial complications.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is the thread running through almost everything Bigham has built. The World Health Organization calls it one of the greatest threats to global health. The pipeline for new antibiotics has been thin for decades because the economics are brutal - antibiotics are used for short courses and should be used sparingly, which limits revenue. Bigham navigated that paradox for nearly a decade at Paratek, turning scientific conviction into a publicly-traded company with a commercialized product.

Beyond the Office

In May 2019, between handing off the CEO role and settling into Executive Chairman, Bigham traveled to Bulgaria. Not for a deal, not for a conference. He lectured in the Entrepreneurship Master's program at Varna Free University "Chernorizets Hrabar," coordinated by the Bulgarian Entrepreneurship Center Foundation. It is a small detail, but revealing: a career-long banker-turned-operator taking time to teach before the next chapter starts.

He also serves on the board of Spirit of America, the nonprofit that delivers aid to local allies of US military and diplomatic personnel in conflict zones. Since 2014, Bigham has been an independent board member - another commitment that sits well outside the typical biotech executive's orbit.

The Full Arc

What He Built

• Led FDA approval and US commercial launch of NUZYRA (omadacycline) in October 2018 - a novel broad-spectrum antibiotic for drug-resistant bacterial infections
• Secured over $193M in total funding for Paratek Pharmaceuticals, including a $60M financing round
• Early executive (EVP Operations, CFO) at Gilead Sciences, helping build the company in its pre-blockbuster era
• Founded and led Avila Therapeutics from Series A, personally assembling its founding management team
• Led Coulter Pharmaceuticals through a successful merger into Corixa Corporation
• Twelve-plus years as General Partner at Abingworth LLP, one of the world's longest-running life sciences investment groups
• Board service across Adamas Pharmaceuticals, Avedro, Supernus, Portola Pharmaceuticals, Valeritas, and Magellan Biosciences
• Independent board member of Spirit of America since 2014, supporting US military and diplomatic aid missions

Details Worth Keeping

The Foundation

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