OMAHA, Nebraska (November 17, 2023)—UNeMed announced today that Michael Bishop, PhD, and Kimberly Lamb, PhD, have joined its Board of Directors.
“When the topic of new Directors came up,” UNeMed Chairperson Anne Barnes said, “we knew it was important for us add expertise from the strongest biotechnology clusters in the world and we couldn’t be happier with the result. Adding expertise and connections from Boston and San Diego is a homerun for us.”
UNeMed, the technology transfer and commercialization office for the University of Nebraska Medical Center and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, officially added the new members during the most recent Board of Directors meeting held on Nov. 6, 2023.
“Dr. Lamb and Dr. Bishop are incredible assets for UNeMed and all the University inventors we serve,” Barnes said. “Honestly, this should be viewed as great news for everyone in Nebraska, because these are two people with extensive and impressive backgrounds. They have the kind of perspective and experience that can have a massively positive impact.”
UNeMed serves all UNMC and UNO researchers, faculty and staff who develop new technologies and inventions, and strives to help bring those innovations to the marketplace.
Kim Lamb, PhD
For Dr. Lamb, a Boston-area native, this will be her second stint with UNeMed. After earning her doctorate in cell and molecular biology from UNMC in 1998, Dr. Lamb worked as a research scientist at Transgenomic, Inc., a life sciences-startup based in Omaha. She then joined UNeMed as a marketing specialist in 2000, and was promoted to UNeMed’s vice president of marketing and licensing before returning to Boston in 2005.
“I was fortunate to have Dr. Lamb as a mentor during my early days in technology transfer, and I’m excited that we have been able to recruit her back in this role,” UNeMed President and CEO Michael Dixon, PhD, said. “The breadth and depth of her experience on both the academic and corporate side—as well as her deep connections in the Boston bioscience cluster—will open many new doors for UNMC and UNO innovators.
Back in Boston, she amassed an impressive record developing experience creating and implementing strategy and processes to propel discovery and clinical stage programs for drug discovery over the last 18 years—at places like Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Merck Sharp & Dohme, LLC, Epizyme, Inc. and Applied Genetic Technologies, Inc. In her most recent role at Amathus Therapeutics Inc., she led a discovery collaboration for Parkinson’s disease with Merck, and assumed a corporate leadership role to oversee operations and the budget on behalf of the company for the board.
Dr. Lamb said she still holds an affinity for Omaha and UNMC.
“While the Boston area will always be home for me, my years at UNMC and in Omaha provided the foundation for my professional success driving drug discovery collaborations, and I really wanted to find a way to contribute more,” Dr. Lamb said. “Getting this chance to be a part of something bigger than myself and find some small way to give back to UNMC and UNeMed was an opportunity I couldn’t walk away from. The amount of growth I’ve seen at both UNO and UNMC campuses in the last 10-15 years is mind-blowing. I’m convinced that some great things are coming, and I’m incredibly honored to be a part of it.”
Mike Bishop, PhD
Dr. Bishop, who earned his doctorate in organic chemistry from Rice University in 1993, joins UNeMed’s Board of Directors with a no less impressive track record, which includes 26 years as a medicinal chemist with GlaxoSmithKline, LLC.
“When we started looking for a candidate that had both industry and academic drug development experience, Dr. Bishop jumped off the page immediately as a perfect fit,” Dr. Dixon said. “His experience in big pharma, working with academics developing new therapeutics, is a fantastic fit for us. In addition, Dr. Bishop will help us connect with the second largest biotech cluster in the world: San Diego. His experience and professional insights should open a whole range of new doors for us.”
It was as GSK’s senior director of Discovery Partnerships with Academia that Dr. Bishop first encountered UNeMed, during its Midwest Drug Development Conference in 2018.
“I was extremely impressed by this effort, and it marked UNeMed as a group with innovative ideas that gets things done,” Dr. Bishop said. “I’m excited to join the Board of such an organization and look forward to providing thoughtful support and governance.”
Dr. Bishop is currently the CEO and principal consultant at Bishop Drug Discovery Consulting, a company he founded in 2019. While working as a consultant, he has served in a variety of scientific and research-related roles for new biotech companies, where he helps build drug discovery plans, find new drug candidates, secure intellectual property and cultivate potential investors.
Prior to his consulting work, Dr. Bishop spent most of his career at GSK where his teams and programs delivered a dozen clinical development candidates. As the Director of GSK’s Discovery Partnerships in Academia program, Dr. Bishop also built successful partnerships with academic researchers and their projects, which often led to new startup companies.
Before joining GSK, Dr. Bishop was a technical support chemist at the Amoco Chemical Company in Texas. After receiving his PhD, he signed on as a Medical Chemist at Burroughs Wellcome, which merged into GlaxoWellcome in 1995 and eventually became GSK in 2000.
