GBI Bio has named Jesse McCool, PhD, as Chief Executive Officer, effective September 8, 2026. “Since joining GBI, Jesse has demonstrated a strong commitment to our clients, our mission, and the disciplined execution and innovation required to position the company for its next stage of growth,” said Karl Pinto, Board Chairman. “The Board is confident in Jesse’s ability to lead GBI as we build toward commercial-scale biologics manufacturing and expand our capabilities for early-stage and complex biologic programs.”
About Jesse McCool
McCool brings more than two decades of bioprocess engineering, biopharmaceutical development, and CDMO leadership experience to the role. “I am honored by the Board’s confidence and excited to lead GBI through this important next chapter,” McCool said. “We have a talented and dedicated team, strong scientific and manufacturing capabilities, and a clear opportunity to serve clients from early development through commercial supply. Our focus will remain on quality, reliable partnership and delivery, disciplined execution, and technology innovation that helps our customers bring important biologic therapies to patients faster.”
McCool joined GBI as President and Chief Operating Officer in December 2025 before being named CEO. Before GBI, he served as Chief Scientific Officer, Site Head, and Technical Advisor at Bionova Scientific, where he launched the company’s brand in the gene therapy CDMO marketplace and managed the design and construction of a 10,000-square-foot brownfield plasmid DNA facility in Texas. He also served as a short-term turnaround Chief Operating Officer at Our Blood Institute in Oklahoma City, restructuring the organization’s donor recruitment and technical operations teams and leading engineering plans for a point-of-care CAR T-cell manufacturing capability.
McCool co-founded and served as CEO of Wheeler Bio, an Oklahoma City-based CDMO focused on integrating discovery and development for early-stage antibody products, where he raised $54 million in equity financing, built three GMP facilities, and developed the company’s Portable CMC® platform. Earlier, he spent nearly seven years at Cytovance Biologics, rising from Vice President of Microbial Services to Chief Technology Officer and ultimately Chief Executive Officer, where he helped scale the company from $18 million to $100 million in annual revenue ahead of its acquisition and Hong Kong IPO. He began his industry career at Lonza, spending more than five years in process development roles across the company’s Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and Visp, Switzerland, sites, and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in bioengineering at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering.
McCool holds a PhD in Microbiology and a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and completed an advanced course in Microbial Physiology and Fermentation Technology at Delft University of Technology.
About GBI Bio
GBI Bio is a Florida-based, full-service biopharmaceutical CDMO focused on reducing manufacturing risk for developers of complex biologic therapies. For more than 30 years, the company, formerly known as Goodwin Biotechnology, has supported more than 500 large-molecule programs, 50 bioconjugation projects, and 50 regulatory filings from its integrated, single-site operations in Plantation, Florida, spanning process development and cGMP drug substance and drug product manufacturing. GBI recently completed a $26 million expansion of its Broward County headquarters, adding 15,000 square feet of bioreactor capacity to double its production capabilities.
