Hootan Khatami

Hootan Khatami, MD serves as Global Medical Lead at SSI Strategy. In Dr. Khatami’s role at SSI Strategy, he focuses on providing a medical and scientific perspective to in Medical Affairs strategy, pre-launch and launch planning, and clinical development/lifecycle strategy. He plays a key role in SSI’s bespoke advisory services and medical leadership service offerings.

Most recently, Dr. Khatami was Vice President and Head of Global Medical Affairs at Sucampo Pharmaceuticals, later acquired by Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, focusing on launch planning and medical organizational leadership for the Sucampo pipeline in rare neurologic and GI diseases. Prior to joining Sucampo, Dr. Khatami served as Chief Executive Officer and interim Chief Medical Officer at Escala Therapeutics, focused on clinical development and regulatory leadership of the company’s early clinical-stage pipeline in rare neuromuscular and nephrologic disorders, as well as leading the overall corporate management and pipeline growth strategy.

Dr. Khatami’s other professional experiences include nearly 20 years of academic and industry clinical and translational R&D in cardiovascular/metabolic disorders and rare diseases in positions of increasing responsibility, spanning the full lifecycle of drug development at Merck, Roche-Genentech, Sanofi-Genzyme, and Daiichi-Sankyo. His key experiences included US, Global and Regional medical affairs team leadership; product launches (Kynamro at Genzyme; Toujeo at Sanofi); medical affairs lead and pre-launch planning for Global, US and Latin America for Taspoglutide; clinical development and phase 4 strategy of sitagliptin/Januvia; as well lifecycle and portfolio strategy and organizational management. Other roles have involved early to late stage clinical development; as well as business development, licensing evaluations, and alliance management.

Dr. Khatami earned his Doctor of Medicine degree at Albany Medical College; and completed Endocrinology fellowship at University of California, San Francisco, where he led the conduct of a proof of concept study of leptin for the treatment of HIV-associated Lipodystrophy. He completed internal medicine residency at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, CA, and Dual Bachelors of Arts in Integrative Biology and French Literature at University of California, Berkeley.

He is proficient in French, Spanish and Farsi.