Leopold Grillberger describes Winchester, a small town near Boston where he now lives: “It’s a beautiful place to reside with the nearby Fells natural reservation,” he said. “Your daily life is in a very charming, safe and small little town, while you have all the amenities of the city of Boston just a stone’s throw away."
Leopold moved to the US in 2017. Beforehand, he never imagined he would live in the US. Beginning in the late 1990s until 2016, he was working in R&D for the global healthcare company Baxter, later Baxalta, developing drug substance processes of biologics, vaccines and gene therapies. As part of this role, he was traveling across the US to unglamorous industrial sites and often not seeing much beyond his hotel rooms. Once he got married and started a family, the thought of living in the US and raising his children there seemed like even less of a possibility.
Then, the opportunity came: Biotech company Shire acquired Baxalta, the company Leopold was working for at the time, and he moved to a new global leadership role at Shire’s headquarters in Lexington, bringing his wife and two children to Massachusetts. Leopold’s wife, he said, has also built a remarkable career in the US, “seizing opportunities in the Boston Metropolitan area that would not have been available in Austria.” His kids, who were very young when the family moved, “feel like Americans and behave like Americans.”
Recently in 2023, Leopold founded his own biotech consulting company and is making his own way in the industry after over 30 years in a corporate pharma environment. He enjoys sharing his extensive expertise with his clients, accumulated from working on hundreds of projects across diverse therapeutic areas including rare diseases, vaccines, gene therapy, and cell therapy.
“It gives me a lot of purpose because I can really focus on that science and technology that I always loved, along with where I can provide the most benefit for my clients,” he said. “Deep in my heart I was always a scientist, no matter what other roles I had.”
His company, LG Biotech Consulting LLC, works with smaller biotech companies on manufacturing science, tech transfer and process development projects. His clients are mainly located in the EU and Switzerland, and he is currently also exploring business opportunities with Austrian companies and academic and inter-university research institutes.
Leopold values the practical impact of science on public health and is excited about the possibility of advanced, even personalized treatments for diseases in the future. “One of the exciting things in the field is that there’s almost no limitation in scope of what you can do,” he said.
For now, Leopold is content with supporting his clients, both foreign and domestic, from his base in the Boston area, but he hopes to one day also work again and finally retire in Austria.
“Certainly the best place in the world to live a good life is not a single place only,” he said.
