Noel
Greenberger

Most inhalers ask something of the patient: a strong, steady pull of air. That's a quiet, cruel design flaw. The people who most need a deep-lung dose are often the ones who can least summon the breath to get it there. Noel Greenberger runs a company built around that contradiction. As CEO of Nob Hill Therapeutics, he is commercializing DryNeb, a dry powder nebulizer engineered to deliver high therapeutic doses to the lower respiratory tract independent of a patient's lung capacity. Suitable, the company says, for patients of any age and any breathing ability.

Nob Hill is not a coastal biotech giant. It is a small, focused operation headquartered at 5901 Indian School Road in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a portfolio company of VIC Technology Venture Development. Greenberger is its chief executive, its commercial brain, and its public voice. The headcount is tiny. The ambition is not.

An engineer who reads lungs like a system

Start with the training, because it explains the temperament. Greenberger earned a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University. Industrial engineering is the discipline of making complicated systems work better - inputs, constraints, bottlenecks, throughput. Then came an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the most competitive business programs anywhere. Engineer's eye, operator's toolkit. It is a useful combination when your product is a physics problem wearing a business suit: get a precise dose of dry powder to aerosolize and travel to exactly the right depth of the lung, reliably, in a patient who may not be able to help.

His career reads like a slow zoom from advice to action. He began in consulting - first at ZS Associates, focused on pharmaceutical sales and marketing strategy, then in the healthcare practice at McKinsey & Company. Consulting teaches you to diagnose other people's businesses. At some point, Greenberger clearly decided he wanted to run one.

The respiratory throughline

The pivot toward lungs happened at Sandoz, the generics division of Novartis. There Greenberger held leadership roles in biopharmaceuticals and strategic planning before becoming Executive Director of Respiratory at Sandoz U.S., where he built and commercialized the company's portfolio of respiratory medicines. That is a rare kind of experience: not just selling respiratory drugs, but assembling the portfolio and bringing it to market. He then took the commercial reins entirely as Chief Commercial Officer of Vertice Pharma, a private-equity-backed specialty pharmaceutical company.

By the time Nob Hill came calling, respiratory was not a bet for Greenberger. It was a specialty. And he did not simply parachute in as a hired gun. He spent roughly a year on the company's strategic advisory board first, learning the technology from the inside. When the CEO seat opened, he stepped up. The appointment took effect on September 1, 2022.

The first year set the tone

His arrival came bundled with news that would define the early roadmap: Nob Hill secured a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Phase II grant of up to $1.73 million to develop an inhaled dry powder antifungal on the DryNeb platform. The grant covered powder formulation, delivery-device development, and pre-IND studies - and it built on an earlier Phase I effort that had shown encouraging results. Non-dilutive money that let a small company advance real science without handing over equity. For an operator who came up counting inputs and constraints, that is close to an ideal starting hand.

Two years later, Greenberger closed the round that startups actually get judged on. In August 2024, Nob Hill raised a $3 million Series A, led by Tramway Venture Partners with participation from TCA Venture Group and VIC Technology Venture Development. Chris Japp, Managing Partner at Tramway, joined the board. Greenberger, characteristically, framed it around the mission and the money in the same breath.

He was pointed about the kind of capital he wanted, too - not just checks, but expertise. His investors, he noted, bring years of medical-device and therapeutic experience plus pulmonary know-how. With that support, he said, the company could accelerate its drive to address some of the most challenging pulmonary diseases. It is a telling instinct: pick money that also knows the field.

Building the bench

In June 2025, Greenberger widened the company's expertise from the outside in, expanding Nob Hill's strategic advisory board with two specialists - Dr. Mark Parry-Billings, a biotech and pharma executive with more than three decades in respiratory drug development, and Dr. Scott L. Shofer, a critical-care physician and pulmonologist at Duke University Hospital. "We are honored to welcome Dr. Parry-Billings and Dr. Shofer to our Strategic Advisory Board," he said. For a company that started as a device thesis, stacking the room with people who understand both the drug and the patient is the kind of unglamorous move that decides whether a platform ships.

The shape of the bet

Add it up and a pattern appears. Greenberger did not chase the loudest markets or the trendiest science. He found a hard, specific problem - getting a real dose to a compromised lung - and matched it to a device that treats the breath as optional rather than required. Then he assembled the pieces a platform needs to survive: federal grant money, a syndicate of specialist investors, an advisory board that spans the lab and the bedside. It is patient, methodical, unflashy work, run out of a New Mexico office far from the usual biotech gravity wells. Which, for an industrial engineer turned CEO, is probably exactly the point.