Rubén Darío Flores Saaib

Ruben is a Senior Director of Business Development at Ligand Pharmaceuticals, part of a team responsible for sourcing, due diligence, transactions, and the management of Ligand’s investments in late-stage therapeutic programmes and platform technologies.

Prior to his role at Ligand, Ruben was Academic Innovations and Partnerships Lead at General Inception, a venture studio based in Palo Alto, with operations in the USA and Europe.

Ruben’s corporate experience includes roles in R&D at BD Biosciences Pharmingen; clinical trial design and execution at Biosite (now Abbott); and Team Leader for Diagnostics and Luminex at Chemicon (now MilliporeSigma). He was later a founding member of the Scientific Collaborations and Business Development group, where he developed worldwide collaborations, sponsored research, and licensing agreements with academic scientists.

Ruben’s ten years of experience in academic knowledge transfer include serving as Vice President for Business Development at LA BioMed (now the Lundquist Institute); Director of the Office of Innovation and Commercialization at UC San Diego, at the time the largest technology transfer office in the UC system; and Associate Director of Licensing at the University of Southern California, where he led a team working on the commercialisation of inventions in the physical sciences and devices. Ruben is also a co-founder and past President of the San Diego Innovation Council.