Sarah Lively, PhD

Sarah Lively, Senior Director, External Innovation, Discovery, Product Development & Supply (DPDS), is located at the Johnson & Johnson Innovation Center in South San Francisco, California. In this role, she has overall strategic and operational responsibility for the scouting and evaluation of external opportunities for DPDS in Western North America, Australia and New Zealand across all synthetic drug modalities. She provides transactional support from a scientific and strategic perspective for DPDS-driven deals and assists the Therapeutic Area Innovation Leads with her scientific and technological expertise. Sarah also partners with the JLABS organization to identify and foster start-up companies that are aligned with DPDS strategy.

Prior to joining Johnson & Johnson Innovation, Sarah was VP of Innovation and New Technology at ChemPartner, a global discovery CRO organization for which she set up and managed US lab operations and led initiatives to broker partnerships with academic institutes for early stage therapeutic discovery. She also introduced novel versions of B-cell cloning and DNA-encoded library (DEL) technologies to ChemPartner. Sarah has more than 20 years of experience in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries and has taken the lead in various small molecule discovery programs across a range of therapeutic areas, most notably at Tularik and Amgen.