Global life sciences investment platform appoints VP Head of AI & Data Intelligence

Nan Fung Life Sciences (NFLS), part of the Nan Fung Group, is a $2bn global investment platform focusing on life sciences. Nan Fung Life Sciences has significant presence in both US and Greater China through direct investments via Pivotal bioVenture Partners funds and fund investments covering therapeutics, medical devices, diagnostics & research tools, and Healthcare IT & Services. LifeSci Search was hired to place a Head of Research to build out a team and direct the building of an AI platform that incorporates scientific and clinical public, private, government and other unique data sets that will generate insights for investment decisions for the fund. With a focus on therapeutics to start, they plan to ambitiously take the idea of infusing existing manually built maps of different therapeutic areas with AI capable of creating a broader vision; this had not been done to date.

The Approach

LifeSci swiftly kicked off the search and we found there were predominantly two types of backgrounds in candidates we spoke with, those with experience creating AI approaches for pure investment decision making insights and AI approaches for drug development insights, however, this role would be combine both. This person needed to be entrepreneurial, comfortable with ambiguity, risk taking and energized to build something that had not been done before. The Managing Director of NFLS spoke with several candidates we presented with varying backgrounds from Director to C Suite experience with skillsets ranging from management consulting to healthcare data analytics to AI & Data Science. With each candidate interviewed, the client gained better clarity on the level of leadership, skillset and experience that was appropriate for this new position to the market. The team worked creatively to present a diverse pool of candidates and ultimately two finalists emerged.

The Outcome

We successfully placed Shiva Amiri, former Director of Data Technology and Infrastructure at 23andMe as NFLS’s new VP Head of AI & Data Intelligence. Shiva’s track record creating the data technology and infrastructure roadmap powering 23andMe’s therapeutics and consumer businesses was an exciting match for the needs of the fund. LifeSci completed this complicated search in 6 months.