Steven M. Paul

Paul received his undergraduate degree at Tulane University in 1972 and obtained a master's and MD degree there in 1975. He spent a year as a resident in psychiatry at the University of Chicago before joining the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1976. He is a 1968 graduate of Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Flossmoor, Ill.

At NIMH, he joined the laboratory of Julius Axelrod. In 1982, Paul and his colleague, Phil Skolnick, published their discovery that the ethyl ester of beta carboline-3-carboxylic acid (beta-CCE) triggered anxiety in people; the work was recognized as an example of the growing ability of neuroscientists to understand the biochemistry of emotions. In 1989, he was the senior scientist on a paper published in Nature that undercut the claim that mutations in a gene on chromosome 11 caused bipolar disorder, which previously had been hailed as evidence that studies of genetics would lead to definitive biomarkers for mental illnesses. Around this time, he became the scientific director of intramural research at NIMH.

Paul moved to Eli Lilly and Company in 1993 as vice president for central nervous system discovery research and decision-phase medical research. He was described by a New York Times reporter in 1996 as being "one of those at the forefront of the development of the coming breed of psychiatric medications." In 1998 he was named group vice president, therapeutic area discovery research and clinical investigation, and by 2003 he was Lilly's executive vice president for science and technology and president of Lilly Research Laboratories. He helped organize cooperation and funding from pharmaceutical companies in establishing the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, a non-proprietary collaborative research effort to establish imaging biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease.

In the early 2000s, Paul helped lead the company toward a new model of drug discovery and development that focused on getting proof of concept as early as possible in the research process, in order to avoid failures in Phase II clinical trials. As part of that effort he helped establish Lilly Chorus, an autonomous business unit that was created to design and execute studies that would allow drug candidates to "fail early" instead of lingering in a company's pipeline. While at Lilly, he oversaw drug development of Cymbalta and Zyprexa. He also led Lilly's work on Alzheimer's drugs, which however dramatically failed in Phase III clinical trials. He also led the expansion of Lilly's presence in New York City through the expansion of ImClone Systems into new research space, and established a research center in San Diego, the third biggest biotechnology hub in the US, after San Francisco and Boston.

He retired from Lilly in 2010, and joined the faculty of the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. In 2010 he also joined Third Rock Ventures as a venture partner. In October 2011, through Third Rock, he co-founded Sage Therapeutics with his long-term collaborator Douglas Covey of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis; the company aimed to discover and develop drugs that were allosteric modulators of receptors in the brain, like the NMDA receptor. In September 2014, he took over as a CEO of Voyager Therapeutics, which he had helped found earlier that year; the company aimed to develop gene therapy drugs for rare CNS diseases.

Boards and memberships

Paul is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institute of Medicine.

As of 2017 he was on the board of directors for Butler University, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, and the Eli Lilly & Co. Foundation. As of 2017 he was also on the board of directors of Alnylam, SAGE Therapeutics, Tal Medical, Sigma-Aldrich, Karuna Pharmaceuticals, Voyager Therapeutics, Constellation Pharmaceuticals, Seaside Therapeutics, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, and DemeRx.