HemoShear, LLC Appoints Leading Industry Executives to its Scientific Advisory Board
“With strong backgrounds in the pharmaceutical industry, Bob and Ken will provide us with important insight into potential applications of our human surrogate disease systems,” said Brett Blackman, Ph.D., HemoShear Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer. “We greatly value the guidance of our Scientific Advisors in investing our development resources in new organ and disease systems that are needed to support the industry’s drug discovery and development efforts.”
“The pharmaceutical industry needs dramatically improved human disease models in the laboratory to eliminate costly failures,” said Batchelor. “HemoShear’s ability to create human surrogate disease models such as atherosclerosis and diabetic complications in its vascular system is very important to understand true disease biology and to target vascular disease processes with improved drug therapies.”
HemoShear’s technology applies human-derived blood flow forces on isolated primary vascular human cells, efficiently and reliably transforming them to their natural physiological behavior within hours. HemoShear’s technology has already been shown to be robust and statistically reliable using cells from hundreds of human donors. This breakthrough technology enables the Company to simulate, in a cell culture dish, disease processes and to evaluate new drug candidates in the human artery and other organ systems.
“The pharmaceutical and biotech industries are expending far too much money and time developing medicines that will ultimately never be approved – it’s become the industry’s biggest problem,” said Ruffolo. “There is a great need for technologies that are more predictive of the true human drug response so that candidates tested in humans are safer and more likely to enhance patient outcomes.”
Dr. Batchelor has 29 years of experience in drug discovery and development within the industry. For ten years, Batchelor was Senior Vice President for Drug Discovery with GSK. During this period, Batchelor played an important role in progressing 11 compounds to positive proof-of-concept clinical trials. He is co-inventor of AvodartTM , a blockbuster drug for the treatment of benign prostatic hypertrophy (BPH). As President and CEO of NovaTarg, Dr. Batchelor now works with small companies to discover and develop innovative drugs for the treatment of metabolic diseases and cancer. Dr. Batchelor holds a B.Sc. in Chemistry from the University of Durham (UK) and a Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Birmingham (UK).
Dr. Ruffolo is the recently-retired President of Research and Development for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and Corporate Senior Vice President of Wyeth. In that role, he led the transformation of the Wyeth R&D pipeline, adding many promising new drug candidates. Prior to joining Wyeth, Dr. Ruffolo spent 17 years in executive R&D management at SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals (now GlaxoSmithKline) and six years at Lilly Research Laboratories. Dr. Ruffolo played a leading role in the discovery and/or development of a number of now-marketed products, including carvedilol, dobutamine, ropinerole and eprosartan. Dr. Ruffolo has won numerous prestigious awards, including the 2008 Scrip Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2008 Discoverer’s Award for the discovery and development of carvedilol (Coreg®). Dr. Ruffolo received his B.S. in Pharmacy summa cum laude with Distinction, and his Ph.D. in Pharmacology, both from The Ohio State University.
About HemoShear
HemoShear’s proprietary technology platform replicates the biology of healthy and diseased organs by applying human-derived blood flow forces to organ-specific human cell types. The Company provides scientific insight and economic value across all phases of pharmaceutical research and development by meeting the industry’s critical need for predictive, physiologically relevant systems. www.hemoshear.com
Contact: Jim Powers, CEO- 434-872-0198
Media Contact: Cory Tromblee, MacDougall Biomedical Communications- 781-235-3060