Elaine Stracker, PhD, JD is our General Counsel and a member of the executive leadership team and is responsible for global legal, data privacy, and compliance. Dr. Stracker has more than 20 years of legal experience handling corporate, business, intellectual property, transactional, compliance, employment, and litigation matters. Dr. Stracker also has extensive experience working with Boards and investors, assessing and evaluating technologies, and building teams.
Dr. Stracker has worked for both big pharma and medical device companies, biotech start-ups and law firms in a number of legal roles. She has held General Counsel positions at both public and private companies. Dr. Stracker was most recently General Counsel and Head of Compliance at Summit Therapeutics, Inc. a publicly traded biotech company, where she drafted and negotiated the $5B collaboration and license deal between Summit Therapeutics, Inc. and Akeso, Inc., led the development of the compliance program and IP strategy, managed CMC and built a legal team. Prior to Summit, she has been General Counsel at Pharmacyclics, Inc.; Indigo Ag., Inc.; and Maky Zanganeh & Associates, Inc., where she participated in a number of significant financing and transactions deals, including the sale of Pharmacyclics to AbbVie, Inc. for $21B. She has also held senior leadership positions of increasing responsibility within companies, such as AbbVie, Inc.; Medtronic, Inc.; Gilead Sciences, Inc.; Merck &Co, Inc.; Alexza MDC; Molecular Probes, Inc., and Affymax Research Institute (a GSK company).
Dr. Stracker received her PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of California, Davis and her JD from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a registered patent attorney with the USPTO. Dr. Stracker is the recipient of several honors and distinctions including a Tribute to Women in Industry Award and a Jurisprudence Award for Patent Law. She is published in the area of advanced licensing agreements and is an inventor on several patents.