September 27, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
AUSTIN, Texas – Joshua McClure, the chief executive officer of MaxWell BioSciences, is seeking more women to fill positions at his company over qualified male applicants, according to reports.
I am actively hiring talented women in operations and technical roles. Not to equalize the industry. Because I think women think different.— Joshua McClure (@joshuamcclure) September 24, 2017
On Twitter, McClure said he was “actively ignoring male talent to search for female,” according to a report in the conservative Daily Caller. His comments were part of a Twitter discussion about hiring female employees. He said being male does not mean he cannot “change opportunities for women.”
Throughout the online discussion McClure said he believed hiring women was a good thing because their thought processes are different than those of men. He also said, according to the report that he wanted to diversify his workforce in order to “alienate the comfort zone.”
“What is the point of a startup that doesn’t think different. Shake things up. Alienate the comfort zone,” he said in the Twitter discussion.
Additionally McClure said that diversity is not about “equal” or “same” talent. McClure said it’s about carefully reselecting for “different.”
There has been an increased push for women to hold executive positions in the biotech industry. Women occupy only 20 of 112 senior management roles at the 10 highest-valued companies in the pharma and biotech industry.
The Daily Caller noted that some Twitter users called McClure out for being discriminatory against male applicants. McClure has since deleted the original comment about hiring women over men, but it was preserved by the conservative publication.
Most of McClure’s tweets referenced above remain on his feed. One that may have been in response to some of his critics for focusing on hiring women reminds people they should not “feed” the Internet trolls.
According to its website, MaxWell BioSciences is “working on computer-assisted immunotherapeutic solutions to treat cognitive impairment drivers with personalized therapies prior to permanent brain injury.” MaxWell has developed a patent-pending “plasma exchange protocol” that removes an Alzheimer disease patient’s plasma and replaces it “with a contract manufactured and optimized plasma product.” The company intends to submit a New Drug Application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the drug called PlasMax. The therapeutic candidate is collected from a curated, young donor registry… “to remove microbes, cellular material, HLA antibodies, blood type markers and prions while maintaining appropriate levels of proteins, protease inhibitors and coagulation factors.”
The company said its MaxWell Brain MAP (Multifactorial Analysis and Plan) software has shown positive results in in Alzheimer’s patients, with 198 Alzheimer’s patients showing reversal of cognitive decline.
