Director
Amir has built a career in life sciences as a leader with almost 3 decades of drug development experience, focused on the clinical development, registration and commercialization of biopharmaceuticals and biologics in multiple therapeutic areas. He currently serves as the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at Harrow Inc. overseeing all development, clinical, medical and regulatory affairs for Harrow’s marketed ophthalmic products. Prior to Harrow, Amir served as the CSO & EVP Clinical Development at AsclepiX Therapeutics developing novel integrin regulators as potential therapeutics for retinal diseases. Before AsclepiX, he was the Chief Executive Officer for TherOptix, where he was responsible for the business and clinical/medical strategy advancing the novel drug eluting contact lens technology platform of the company to bring innovative products to address unmet medical needs for anterior and posterior segment diseases. While at TherOptix, Amir implemented strategic development on two lead programs, with successfully gaining Orphan Drug Designation (ODD) for one program for prevention of proliferative vitreoretinopathy (PVR) and completing a pre-series A debt financing round for a total of $3.5M. Prior to TherOptix, Amir served as the Chief Development Officer for TearClear leading clinical development and regulatory strategy of all pipeline and late-stage assets.
Before joining TearClear, Amir spent almost 20 years at Shire until it was acquired by Takeda in Jan 2019. At Shire, he helped create the ophthalmology franchise as the Global Therapeutic Area Head in Ophthalmology and was later able to successfully divest the key asset in that franchise, Xiidra ®, to Novartis for $5.3 Billion. While at Shire, Amir oversaw all aspects of clinical stage ophthalmic pipeline assets. His team brought Xiidra ® (lifitegrast) from development through to U.S. FDA filing and approval. Amir’s active engagement in the clinical development around design and implementation of OPUS-3 as well as the analysis of totality of evidence were pivotal in the negotiations with the FDA leading to a US approval in July 2016.
Amir is also an independent Board member at iVeena Inc., (since Dec 2019), ForwardVueInc. (since July 2019), and TearSolutions (since Sep 2024).