Three things you should know about David Parrillo.

1: He is a fusion of business acumen and scientific acuity.

“David is a business development professional with the rare ability to grasp Sponsors’ needs and technologies and champion these needs internally to our team. At the same time, he represents our unique service offerings in a manner that forges the foundation for a synergistic relationship,” says Dr. Rami Tzafriri, Director of Research and Innovation for CBSET. “I am an internal advocate for our Sponsors,” explains David, who earned Biology and MBA degrees at Providence College. His broad-based professional experiences include working closely with clinicians from the major academic medical centers in New England, including Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, Tufts Medical Center, and UMass Medical Center.

2: He knows Big Pharma collaboration.

Early in David’s career, he worked in field and hospital sales positions calling on practicing clinicians, some of whom were involved in both basic science as well as clinical research. “These positions not only enabled me to thoroughly embrace the ‘front-end’ of the healthcare business,” David says, “but also provided me with an insider’s view of the collaborative nature of Big Pharma.” For example, at Bristol Meyers Squibb, known for “advancing science through supporting novel, independent research,” he developed expertise in the therapeutic area of cardiovascular disease. At EMD Serono, David saw firsthand how critical it is for a biotech organization to partner, consult, and collaborate with others beyond its own laboratories. “We were certainly committed to broadening our relationships with innovators, scientists and entrepreneurs,” says David, “and I was able to benefit from an insider’s view of how to identify, establish, and nourish collaborative relationships.” At Schering-Plough (now Merck) he further expanded the breadth of his therapeutic expertise to the areas of allergy, immunology, and oncology.

3: He knows the translational pathway.

In his five years in a business development role at CBSET, David has worked with startups and established companies in a variety of medical- device and therapeutic areas that include diabetes, cystic fibrosis, gastroenterology, cardiology, wound healing, dermatology, regenerative medicine, and oncology. “It was obvious to me from the start that, at CBSET, we are recognized as unbiased experts who bring independent credibility to a Sponsor’s regulatory filings,” says David. “We are a nonprofit translational research institute, so our culture is scientifically rather than commercially focused. The dual mandate of CBSET means that not only do I get to discuss the GLP safety needs of Sponsors, but I also interact with a wide variety of MedTech innovators, helping to design the preclinical studies that support their R&D and product-differentiation efforts. The most satisfying aspect is the direct and immediate access to the varied expertise of our scientific, interventional, veterinary, and pathology teams, as well as our academic collaborators, to tackle the complex requests we regularly face from Sponsors.”