Ruben is a Sr. Director of Business Development at Ligand Pharmaceuticals, part of a team performing sourcing, diligence, transactions, and management of Ligand’s investments in late-stage therapeutic programs and platform technologies.
Prior to his role at Ligand, Ruben was the Academic Innovations and Partnerships Lead at General Inception, a Venture Studio based in Palo Alto, with operations in the USA and Europe.
Ruben’s 12-year corporate life sciences career includes roles in R&D at BD Biosciences Pharmingen, clinical trial design and execution at Biosite (now Abbott), team leader for diagnostics and Luminex at Chemicon (now Millipore SIGMA). Later Rubén was a founding member of the Scientific Collaborations and Business Development group, where he developed worldwide collaborations, sponsored research, and licensing with academic scientists across to develop research reagents, devices, biomaterials for use in research and bioprocessing., as well as early stage leads for therapeutic applications in a variety of fields.
Rubén’s 10-year academic technology transfer includes serving as Vice President for Business Development at LA BioMed (now the Lundquist Institute), Director of the Office of Innovation and Commercialization at UCSD, the largest TTO of the UC system at the time, and Associate Director of Licensing at the University of Southern California, leading a team working on the commercialization of inventions in physical sciences and devices.