Allen Gross

Vice President, EFL Associates, Life Sciences

Allen Gross joined EFL Associates as a vice president/consultant in August 2008 to help build on the firm’s success in the growing area of life sciences. Gross brings more than 15 years of experience in successfully marketing complex solutions to life science companies. Gross started his career with General Electric in 1989, where he was accepted into GE’s Chemical and Materials Leadership Program as an application development engineer with a commercial focus on business development for GE’s engineered plastics. His scope of responsibility expanded when he accepted a senior account manager position with The ANGUS Chemical Company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company. Gross received special recognition for quickly bringing customer and supplier leadership together to collaborate on solutions to enter new markets, launch new products and mitigate raw material supply risks. Gross was promoted to market development manager in 2000 and focused on building a new product development process; rationalizing and segmenting the current product offering; and launching new product and marketing initiatives into the strategic market segments of biopharmaceuticals, in-vitro diagnostics; and small-molecule active pharmaceutical ingredients. During his tenure, Gross was certified as a Six Sigma black belt. He was recognized as one of the few black belts in The Dow Chemical Company capable of applying Six Sigma principles to intricate market pricing and product rationalization projects resulting in measurable earnings improvements. In 2003 Gross accepted a position with SAFC Biosciences (formerly JRH Biosciences), a member of the Sigma-Aldrich Group, as Global Marketing Manager. In this role, he had profit and loss responsibility for $35 million worth of proprietary cell culture media and recombinant growth factor product lines used in the cGMP (current Good Manufacturing Practice) manufacture of vaccines and biotherapeutics. He also created, presented and executed a strategic plan to acquire majority supply positions for pre-clinical and early stage clinical molecules in established and emerging pharmaceutical companies’ growing pipeline of biologics around the globe. Gross’ market segmentation analysis is now used as the company’s benchmark to make decisions for resource deployment and selling efforts. He authored ISO-9001-compliant design control operating procedures used across the organization to marry market need to strategic alignment of marketing, research and operations resources. Gross also launched SAFC Biosciences’ first drug development services offering to improve the chances of target selection and scale up success of customers’ monoclonal antibody and recombinant protein production platforms. As a result of Gross’ success and longevity in this industry, he has developed a wealth of contacts in the global bioscience marketplace, allowing him the perspective and network to successfully bring executives to the table.

Allen holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Iowa State University.