Claire Mazumdar

About

In 2018, Biocon chief Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw’s hunt for someone to lead U.S.-based, clinical-stage oncology firm Bicara stopped at her MIT and Stanford-educated niece Claire Mazumdar. Claire was then working at Rheos Medicines, a precision medicine company whose global partnership with Roche Pharmaceuticals happened under her guidance. Before Rheos, she was with Third Rock Ventures. “Third Rock taught me discipline in company formation. Rheos…taught me how to translate strong science into the kind of partnership and dealmaking that helps get a programme to patients faster,” she says. Both experiences shaped her approach to Bicara. “[It taught me to] start with uncompromising scientific rigour, build a team and development strategy around that science rather than forcing the science to fit a strategy, and stay as disciplined about execution as we are about the underlying biology,” says the successor to Mazumdar-Shaw at Biocon. Within six years, Bicara, in which Biocon owns 10%, debuted on Nasdaq at over $1 billion market cap. “Numerous factors have brought Bicara to where it is today, but two stand out: the strength and differentiation of our science, and our team,” Claire says. Her team, on a “mission to improve the lives of cancer patients”, is focussed on taking the in-house developed Ficerafusp alfa, a first-in-class bifunctional antibody for solid tumours, from testing to patients.