Cohn & Wolfe healthcare head Jennifer Gottlieb has jumped ship to bicoastal boutique Weisscom Partners.

Gottlieb, who was EVP and managing director of the PR firm’s New York healthcare practice, becomes managing director and head of East Coast operations at Weisscom, which handles Genentech’s oncology franchise as well as several GlaxoSmith-Kline accounts.

After nine years at Cohn & Wolfe, Gottlieb said, “It was going to take a very unique and different opportunity to get me to leave. Weiscomm is a growing operation, and it’s something I haven’t done.”

With offices in New York and San Francisco, Weisscom, which handles product and corporate communications and investor relations, boasts a staff of 30. 

Weisscom principals Jim Weiss and Dianne Weisler worked with Gottlieb in her days at Makovsky in the 1990s, when Weisler was a colleague and Weiss was a client with RPR, later absorbed into Aventis.