Barbara K. Finck

Dr. Finck is a board certified rheumatologist with more than 25 years of preclinical and clinical drug development experience in academic and biopharmaceutical settings. During her rheumatology training at University of California, San Francisco she studied the effects of CTLA4-Ig (subsequently developed and marketed as Orencia®) in a murine lupus nephritis model.

Dr. Finck, whose drug development activities have spanned multiple therapeutic areas, started her pharmaceutical career at ALZA as medical director for early clinical development of Ditropan-XL®, to treat spasms of the bladder. She subsequently held senior level positions at a half-dozen innovative biopharmaceutical companies. At Immunex (later acquired by Amgen) she was lead medical director for the Phase III clinical development of Enbrel® in rheumatoid arthritis and juvenile idiopathic arthritis. At Eos Biotechology, she was VP for Clinical Development. In addition, she was on the executive teams at PDL Biopharma (VP, Clinical Development), Osprey Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. (Senior VP, Research and Development, and Chief Medical Officer), and NKT Therapeutics, Inc. (Chief Medical Officer).

Throughout her career in pharmaceutical development, Dr. Finck has demonstrated the ability to build effective teams and alliances, as well as a personal passion for developing therapeutics to treat diseases where there is significant unmet medical need.

Dr. Finck earned her B.S. from UC Santa Barbara, and her M.D. from UCSF, where she also completed her Internship and Residency in Internal Medicine, and her Fellowship in Rheumatology.