Dual Fluency: The Language of Science and Capital in Life Sciences

What separates the life sciences CEOs who build enduring companies from those who don't? In life sciences, the answer is rarely pedigree, network, or technical knowledge alone. It is the ability to speak two languages simultaneously, the language of science and the language of capital, and to be trusted in both rooms.

Dual Fluency is the practitioner's guide to mastering that rare combination. Drawing on more than thirty years spanning M&A, licensing, partnering, and capital raises across numerous therapeutic disciplines, David H. Crean, PhD, offers an unfiltered view of how transformative companies get built and sold and why so many promising ones quietly fall
apart. This is not a textbook. It is not a retrospective written from the comfort of retirement. It is the operating thesis of a working professional who has sat on both sides of the table inside large pharma, alongside venture and private equity capital providers, and at the advisory helm of investment banking for some of the sector's most complex transactions.

For founders, CEOs, business development executives, scientists entering industry, finance executives, and investors navigating the life sciences ecosystem, Dual Fluency delivers what no MBA curriculum and no conference panel ever could: the unvarnished logic of how science becomes strategy, and how strategy becomes value.

"The most powerful life sciences leaders are those who can move fluidly between scientific truth and financial reality and build organizations that do the same. Leadership in this sector is not just about managing people. It is about managing translation: between data and capital, between discovery and deal, between bench and boardroom."