Wilson Bryan, a former high-ranking Food and Drug Administration official who retired from the agency in March, has joined the regulatory consulting firm Greenleaf Health, according to a Wednesday statement.
For seven years at the FDA, Bryan ran the Office of Tissues and Advanced Therapies, overseeing the regulation of cell- and gene-based treatments during a period of fast progress in those fields. He joins Greenleaf as executive vice president of drug and biological products.
Bryan’s retirement came amid a reorganization and expansion of his department, which was renamed the Office of Therapeutic Products and given more staff. He had led the office since its establishment in 2016. His role is currently filled on an interim basis by Celia Witten.
Bryan previously served in several other director or high-level roles within the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, or CBER. Before joining the agency, he was a neurologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.
At Greenleaf, he’ll have among his new colleagues many former FDA leaders, including John Jenkins, once the director of the Office of New Drugs, and Karen Midthun, who led CBER until the middle of the last decade.
Besides Bryan, several other notable FDA leaders have recently left the agency. Two veteran vaccine reviewers, Marion Gruber and Phil Krause, left in 2021, while Billy Dunn, who led the FDA’s neuroscience division, exited earlier this year.