Irena Melnikova

Irena Melnikova joined Burrill & Company in October 2012 as Managing Director, Russia. Prior to joining Burrill & Company, she served as Director of Strategy and External Innovation at Sanofi.

Previously, Melnikova was a Principal in the Life Science team of TVM Capital, a global venture capital firm. At TVM, she was involved in deal origination and new investment opportunity evaluation and actively participated in the management of TVM Capital investments in the United States. Prior to TVM Capital, she was a member of the biopharma investment banking team at Leerink Swann. She also produced and launched a new series of syndicated reports for the firm. Entitled Future in Focus, these reports provided clients with insight and analysis of business and technology issues shaping corporate and R&D strategies, pipelines and alliances.

Prior to Leerink Swann, Irena was a Research Manager at Life Science Insights, a subsidiary of IDC, the leading technology market research company. As a project leader at TransForm Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Johnson & Johnson), she was responsible for running several programs, including Engineered Tissue Constructs, funded by DARPA, and Amyloidoses.

Irena has published over 20 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals and is a regular contributor to the “Analyst Couch” section of Nature Reviews in Drug Discovery magazine. She holds an M.S. in chemical engineering from the Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia and a Ph.D. in molecular medicine/molecular biology from the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio.