JAMES BUCHANAN, President, Covilance

Dr. James Buchanan is presently an independent drug safety consultant. He graduated from the University of California, San Francisco with a PharmD degree in clinical pharmacy. He worked in the area of clinical toxicology at the Bay Area Regional Poison Control Center at San Francisco General Hospital before entering the pharmaceutical industry.  Dr. Buchanan began his industry career at Genentech where he worked for 9 years in the areas of medical information and drug safety in the clinical development department. He subsequently moved to Gilead Sciences to establish a drug safety department. After leaving Gilead Sciences, Dr. Buchanan started the drug safety department at Tularik Inc where he acted as Chief Safety Officer until the company was acquired 5 years later by Amgen. Following the merger with Amgen, he moved to Nuvelo to establish a drug safety department and act as Chief Safety Officer where he also had responsibility for clinical operations, biostatistics and data management.

Dr. Buchanan next served with BioSoteria for 5 years as the head of the medical and safety consulting group, which was subsequently acquired by Dohmen Life Science Services. Dr. Buchanan is currently president of Covilance, LLC, a drug safety consulting service. He is also a co-lead of the American Statistical Association Biopharmaceutical Safety Working Group and is a co-lead on the Interactive Safety Graphics taskforce that is developing novel, open-source interactive graphical tools to identify and evaluate safety issues during drug development.