Chief Executive Officer
James P. Edwards, Ph.D. is currently serving as Chief Executive officer at Psivant Therapeutics. Jim has been a Venture Partner at Samsara Biocapital since 2022, when he joined following a career at Janssen Research & Development (JRD) that spanned over two decades.
Most recently, Jim was Vice President and Global Head, In Silico Discovery and External Innovation at Janssen where he lead a multi-disciplinary group of computational and data scientists providing predictive and design tools across all modalities within the therapeutics discovery organization. Previously, Jim was Vice President, Discovery Chemistry at JRD where he lead drug discovery teams at all their research and development sites. These teams were responsible for the design and synthesis of small molecule drug candidates, working with partners across all six therapeutic areas within JRD and delivered clinical-stage small molecule drug candidates against targets ranging from G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and kinases to cytokines and cytokine receptors. From 1999–2014, Jim led various immunology medicinal chemistry groups at Johnson & Johnson/Janssen which progressed clinical-stage molecules against novel first-in-class targets such as cathepsin S, histamine H4 and LTA4H. Jim began his career in the pharmaceutical industry at Ligand Pharmaceuticals, working on non-steroidal androgen receptor and progesterone receptor modulators.
Jim received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working with Professor Scott Denmark, and his bachelor of science from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. Jim performed post-doctoral studies with Professor Lanny Liebeskind at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.