About ECD Life Sciences

Daniel Weiss, MD, is the Founding Principal of ECD Life Sciences and a drug development physician with more than 25 years of experience in biopharma. Through ECD Life Sciences, he works with emerging biotechnology companies and foreign sponsors entering the United States, embedding within their teams to advance early development programs from strategy through execution.

Before establishing ECD Life Sciences, Dan served as Head of Early Clinical Development at Schrödinger, where he established the clinical sciences, regulatory sciences, clinical operations, GCP quality, pharmacovigilance, and data sciences functions. Under his leadership, the clinical team filed three successful INDs and CTAs in oncology indications, advanced the company's first global oncology trials and an ex-US healthy volunteer trial into the clinic, and supported the clinical launch of additional oncology assets. He is a fully licensed physician and a Certified Physician Investigator (CPI).

His work spans the full arc of early clinical development: defining strategy, developing target product profiles and integrated development plans, preparing and submitting INDs and CTAs, overseeing CROs and sites, and engaging key opinion leaders. He brings particular depth in first-in-human strategy, clinical pharmacology, and early-phase trial design and operations.

Dan also serves as U.S. FDA Agent for international sponsors, managing FDA correspondence, countersigning applications, and guiding submissions for companies entering the U.S. market. Whatever the engagement, clients work directly with him from the first conversation through execution.

Richa Luthra is a Partner at ECD Life Sciences and a program and portfolio executive with more than 20 years of experience in biopharma, spanning early drug development through global commercialization. She program-manages full drug development engagements across clinical, regulatory, CMC, and operations functions.

Previously, as Executive Director, Portfolio & Program Management and Chief of Staff to the President of the Americas at PharmaEssentia, Richa led integrated strategy across clinical, CMC, regulatory, and commercial functions. At Bristol Myers Squibb (formerly Celgene), she led the fastest product launch in company history, directed a multi-billion-dollar post-acquisition integration, and built a digital innovation hub that improved trial feasibility prediction. At Schrödinger, she built early development operations to enable the company's first first-in-human study. At PAREXEL, she established a new e-clinical business unit and was cited in the New England Journal of Medicine. She has also served as fractional Chief of Staff to a Chief Commercial Officer.

Her expertise covers program and portfolio strategy, global clinical and regulatory development, CMC strategy and supply chain, launch strategy and readiness, cross-functional leadership, alliance and governance management, and operations strategy and execution.