Elaine Hamm

Elaine Hamm is a scientist-turned-operator who serves as president and chief executive of Ascend BioVentures, where she manages a portfolio of early-stage pharmaceutical companies. She is also the first executive-in-residence at Tulane University School of Medicine and the executive director of the Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare.

Hamm’s career has moved through nearly every seat in early-stage drug development. Trained as a microbiologist with a PhD from the University of Oklahoma, she worked at the laboratory bench, led technology-transfer efforts at a university, spent time on the venture-capital side, and then joined one of the companies she had funded, moving onto the operating side of drug development, where she has spent the past decade. She has designed and directed statewide startup-accelerator programs and has helped close roughly $30 million in equity investment, with a focus on pharmaceutical therapeutics and diagnostics.

Hamm appeared on Open Door Salon alongside Christiana Bardon, co-managing partner of MPM BioImpact, for a conversation recorded after the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference on surviving a difficult funding environment. From the operator’s vantage point, she described portfolio companies pushed from “plan A” to “plan F,” the rising bar founders face from both venture and pharma partners, and the practical ways small companies are using AI, such as compiling IND applications, while cautioning that the field is not yet ready to replace animal studies or clinical trials.

Her counsel to founders was to stay true to the original reason they started the company rather than chase the “platform” framing investors reward, and to practice radical intellectual honesty with their boards, bringing the hard numbers forward before a problem worsens rather than hiding it.