Roland Franke, PhD

With 20+ years in the pharmaceutical industry, Dr. Franke has diverse experience in research and development, pharmaceutical mergers and acquisitions, business startup, and operation. In 1999, Dr. Franke was a Co-Founder & CEO of a company focused on developing and manufacturing bulk active taxanes through novel semi-synthetic production technology, which was acquired by Phyton Biotech in 2009. As VP of Business Development and Chief Technical Officer of Phyton Biotech, Dr. Franke extended the customer base for docetaxel and paclitaxel APIs beyond North America and Europe to major markets in Asia delivering an average revenue growth of approximately 40% per year. Under his technical leadership, Phyton developed and implemented the world’s largest production scale for paclitaxel API from plant cell fermentation. For that work, Phyton’s R&D Group received the Research Group of the Year Award in the International Life Science competition in 2011. Dr. Franke has authored numerous patents in the field of taxanes and has 22 publications. Dr. Franke holds a Bachelor of Science from University of Freiburg, a Master of Science from University of Freiburg, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master of Science and MBA from the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.