Founder & CEO of Phase 3 Search — the retained executive search firm for CMC, Quality and Technical Operations leadership in biopharma.
Alex Cooke founded Phase 3 Search to change how biopharma connects with the leaders who turn science into approved medicine. The firm is built on a personal conviction: when the right leaders are in the right place, medicines reach the patients who need them in time to make a difference. That conviction traces back to 1995, when Alex's family lost his fifteen-year-old brother, William, to bacterial meningitis — the science, and the operations to scale it, were not yet where they needed to be.
Over more than a decade, Alex and Phase 3 have completed 112+ retained placements across the functions that decide whether a therapy can be manufactured, scaled and approved — CMC, technical operations and quality — from VP and Senior Director through to the C-suite. The practice is diagnostic-first and partner-led, and it lives day to day in the CMC, CDMO and quality leadership network rather than searching it from the outside.
He writes for the industry on the questions boards and CEOs actually face: when to hire which technical leader, how CMC decisions move enterprise value, and how manufacturing and quality risk shows up long before it reaches a data room. That body of work anchors two of Phase 3's public resources — the CTO Mandate Framework and the Biotech Capital Report.
If you are building or governing the technical leadership of a biopharma company, start a conversation.
