Two years ago, Erika R. Smith left her job as director of the Blavatnik Fund for Innovation at Yale to become chief executive officer of ReNetX Bio. Inc., a New Haven bioscience company that recently began the first human clinical trial of a drug to reverse spinal-cord injury damage.
The move represented a dramatic departure for Smith, 49, who had spent the past 25 years helping faculty and students at several universities advance and commercialize their research and innovations, principally in the life sciences.
Two years after the move, a verdict has been rendered: “It was absolutely the right fit with the right company at the right time,” Smith says today. more