Advice: Disillusioned grad student wants to quit and enter the financial industry

I am currently a PhD student in a biotech-related field starting my second year at the top-ranked program in the country. I never really wanted to go into academia, but as life would have it, this was the path of least resistance. I'm just a year in and am realizing that I need to get out. Finance/investing has always been my biggest passion, but I always felt pressured not to pursue it as a career. I have since come to my senses and actively started job searching (luckily, while my school continues to pay me), but the results have been utterly demoralizing.

My undergrad degree, while not Ivy League, is from a perfectly respectable institution and in math and physics, summa cum laude (>3.9 GPA) and phi beta kappa. I have five first-author peer-reviewed publications based on quantitative techniques. Suffice it to say that I would be able to understand and apply any sort of quantitative tools that the financial industry uses.

I have two years of experience in healthcare consulting, making models to forecast cash flows from new drug releases and helping major pharmaceutical companies price the drugs. In my understanding, these are extremely similar to the types of models that analysts use to value companies, so I believe that working for a fund or investment bank that deals with the biotech industry would be a perfect entry for me, but my search has yielded no replies. There are probably people involved with my current degree program who could help me with this, but I feel that I can't network with them because I might alienate the very people who provide my current source of income...

I imagine the reason that my job search has come up with nothing is that I have no financial industry-specific experience. Yes, I started managing my own portfolio in 2007 (read: just before the housing crash) and have averaged over 40% returns per year without using leverage, penny stocks, options, etc. And yes, the days of research that goes into making these returns possible is what I truly love to do. But again, it’s not industry-specific experience because I wasn’t working for a company—and besides, it just seems like bragging for the sake of bragging.

In short, no one seems to have any imagination and be willing to risk hiring someone who does not have the specific set of experience/coursework that they envision for the position. I am desperately seeking advice. Please help me, lest I be trapped in academia forever!