Meet the LifeScience ORG CEO
Andrea Chicca - Synendos Therapeutics
What called you to lead?
I was passionate about this project, but spinning it out was a jump into the dark.
I really like to solve problems – I read noirs, thrillers and criminology for the same reason – and maybe that’s what helped draw me to life science.
In reality, another big passion of mine was history. My mother is a literature and history teacher in Italy and, when I told her that I wanted to study history, she gave me some practical advice: you can study it, but you probably won’t work as a historian.
So, her advice steered me away from studying history and moving towards something else where I could solve problems and help people. Initially, I wanted to do a medical degree but I wasn’t sure about working with patients directly. That led me to pharmacy and pharmaceutical chemistry.
Leadership, however, was a different calling. In many ways, it was always part of me. From my childhood, I remember a teacher mentioning that I would become a leader because I had a natural tendency to take responsibility.
I was the captain of my football team – the goalkeeper taking responsibility – and the pace-setter in rowing where I was always setting the pace. I think I naturally like to share my passion and excitement which gets others engaged, so it’s part of my character.
It was during my second postdoc – and after working in the pharma industry for a couple of years – that the idea of doing something more like translational medicine arose. At least, that was the goal. We ended up working on a different program, one on potential drugs with a new mode of action that could target diseases in the brain.
We tried to partner or sell the idea to pharmaceutical companies, but at the time they said it was too early. A year or two later, the opportunity came to spin out the program as a startup and, after looking at the pros and cons, I made the jump into the dark.
It wasn’t an easy decision. Leaving a stable path in academia for an uncertain entrepreneurial venture was a leap into the unknown. But I was driven by two things: a belief in what we were developing and a willingness to take on the challenge.
Andrea’s full profile is available for our members inside the community.