About

Tom Maher recently took up a new position as chief of operations, corporate counsel and company secretary at Amarin Pharmaceuticals Ireland, having started in this role in April 2019. He was previously general counsel at Amarin between 2005 and 2010. It is currently a time of major growth, as the company drives forward in its mission to deliver what is stated to be the most important new therapy for cardiovascular health management since statins. Maher says it is ‘an exciting time for me to return. It’s a very different company to the one I left in 2010, and is now very much a commercial business as opposed to a development stage business’. Maher made his first move into the in-house legal industry from the large law firm environment to become vice president at Elan Corporation from 1997 to 2003. At the time Elan was transitioning from a drug delivery background to a fully functional biopharmaceutical company. He says, ‘it was a time of aggressive growth at a highly transactional company; there was lots of deal action available to “cut my teeth”, M&A, corporate, venture partnering and strategic alliances, all on an international basis run from the headquarters in Dublin. This was a fantastic opportunity to move from high quality corporate M&A work in a top-flight corporate law firm in Dublin to the real business world’. Maher first joined Amarin Corporation as general counsel in 2005, his first such position. He says that, ‘this was a transformational period in [my] career stepping up to general counsel in the international biotech arena in a NASDAQ listed company’. His previous role was as senior vice president corporate and chief legal officer at Mainstay Medical International, dual listed on Euronext Dublin and Euronext Paris. While at Mainstay Medical International, Maher oversaw two financing transactions for a total of €60m, which funded the company through its US pivotal trial of ReActiv8. These transactions were structured as the Irish equivalent of US pipe transactions, which was highly innovative in the Irish market place. Also the 2018 transaction involved an investment from the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF). Maher highlights that he ‘had not previously done one of these transactions, so it was very interesting to see that through. That transaction involved a €30m investment from a mix of existing investors, ISIF and new investors, and a number of investment banks were involved. I managed all the corporate negotiations and a legal team in multiple jurisdictions to get to the deal done in a very efficient time period’.