If you're a company focused on vascular disorders it helps to have someone on your board who knows what you're talking about. It helps more if that person has more power than the average doc.

So Akebia Therapeutics should have popped out the champagne when Dr. Victor Dzau agreed to join its Board of Directors. Dzau is the chancellor for health affairs at Duke University and president and CEO of the Duke University Health System. He also pioneered gene therapy for vascular disease.

Akebia is a biopharma company in Cincinnati, Ohio, focused on developing small molecules for the treatment of anemia and vascular disease. It has an oral treatment for anemia that will start phase one of clinical testing later this year. Drugs that treat chronic anemia generate more than $10 billion in worldwide sales.