Gillian Sandler brings 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur, CEO, Chairman, investor, research analyst, and corporate strategist in the U.S. and internationally, across multiple economic and market cycles, restructurings, and stages of growth and financing. Her most recent sector focus has been on the bottlenecks to advancing healthcare transformation in the fields of autoimmune and neurodegenerative disorders.

She serves on the Board of Alryxo [formerly AZTherapies] and as a Board Trustee of Columbia’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. She previously served as a lead investor and Board Director of Invicro [acquired by Konica Minolta 4Q/17] a leading imaging contract research company that transformed the field of preclinical and clinical drug research for Alzheimer’s.

Alryxo is a biotech company with an investment portfolio focused on novel approaches to preventing and treating neurodegenerative diseases, including a CAR-Treg development partnership with Pol-Treg, and an investment in ACTA Pharmaceuticals, a company founded by Dr. Rudolph Tanzi with a diverse pipeline to advance drug development and clinical research on gamma-secretase modulators (GSMs) and small molecules with the potential to modulate mast cell and microglia activation.

Other experiences include former Chair of the Board of Mymee, a pioneer in the autoimmune disease industry that advanced precision health research for patients with inadequate response to immunosuppressants and immunomodulators. The coach-led personalized trial & care platform identifies exposome risks and enables patients to draw direct correlations between their symptoms and triggers, taper or optimize medication regimen, and improve health.

She also previously served as a co-architect and sector strategist behind the 2019 launch of the McKinley global healthcare transformation public market investment portfolio, and as a Board Trustee of the Center of the Study of the Presidency and Congress (CSPC).

Other investments include Linus Bio, a precision exposome sequencing company spun out of Mount Sinai Hospital and Envisagenics, a drug discovery company focused on transcriptomics (splicing errors) spun out of Cold Spring Harbor Labs. Advancing the fields of exposome diagnostics and transcriptomics are both critically important to generating new approaches to precision treatments for patients who are non-responders to targeted oncological, autoimmune and neurological therapies.

Her first role in helping to advance research and care in the field of brain health was 15 years ago serving on the Board of the Pediatric Brain Injury (PBI) Program, U of Miami School of Medicine (the pediatric arm of The Miami Project) a leading center for the prevention, research, and rehabilitation of children with severe brain injury.

Her experience in the consumer and public health space includes her role 2002-2012 as the CEO & Chairman of Todobebe, Inc (sold to Entravision (EVC) 2012), and her experience in entrepreneurship in mobile tech, software and AI includes being the founding CEO of one of the first mobile software tech start up in Europe in 2000 [Wallaware, Inc].

During her tenure at Todobebe, she received the 1st Prevention Pioneer Award for Changing Health Disparity among underserved populations by former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona, and was nominated as a top CEO of Hispanic Media companies by Hispanic Ad (2010 & ‘11). The company led collaborations with HHS, the CDC, USDA, Walmart, Molina Healthcare, and multiple hospitals across the U.S. to shift focus of consumers from treatment to disease prevention. Founded in 1999 as the first parenting website for Spanish & Portuguese speakers in the U.S. and Latin America, Todobebe became a household consumer brand across Broadcast TV (over 250 episodes of “Todobebe” and “Viva La Familia”), Digital, Radio, Events, Marketing, Research, Mobile, Publishing, and Licensing, and multi-year partnerships with the largest TV, retail and consumer brands serving the Hispanic market [such as Univision, Telemundo-NBC, Televisa, Walmart, Procter & Gamble].

She also served from 2001 to 2008 on the Board of Directors of Medcenter Solutions, when it was the leading CRM pharmaceutical marketing and continuing medical education (CME) company in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico.

During her tenure as the founding CEO of Wallaware, it was ranked as a top-4 emerging mobile technology company in Europe by Tornado Insider (‘00), and was selected by IBM as its first “Blue Light” case study supporting emerging mobile tech companies (‘01). The company’s data platform, API and SDK enabled telco’s to securely control, manage, analyze, develop use cases, drive apps development, and monetize consumer and enterprise mobile data use.

Prior roles included:

Strategist with AppNet/CMRC where her role was to advise Fortune 500 corporations across consumer products, healthcare, finance, media and publishing on how to leverage their assets to prepare for long term growth in a rapidly changing technology, telecom & media landscape – build/buy/partner, 10 year business plan development, deal structures, valuation, negotiation.

Equity analyst at JPMorgan, on the team that earned the #1 Institutional Investor ranking for the Telecom Industry in Latin America. She covered privatizations and IPOs across the region, and wrote extensively on the future of the emerging wireless industry. JP Morgan Global Credit analyst developing credit ratings and recommendations behind loans to the largest U.S. retailers during a period of rapid industry transition and high number of bankruptcies (1995).

In October 2012 and February 2013 she completed the Executive Programs “FutureMed” and “Singularity” at Singularity University at NASA/Ames in Mountain View California.

At JPMorgan, she completed the Management Services training program, the Equity Research training program, and received her Series 7 and Series 63 certifications.

Gillian received a BA and Certificate for International Relations with a focus on Developing Economies from Wesleyan University (CT), and ran for the University Track & Cross Country teams.

Prior to University, she worked for a semester at JPL/NASA doing programming (IDL) and satellite industry research for the Chief Scientist of MISR, Dr. David Diner, and did a one month internship studying Dolphins at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory, Oahu, Hawaii.