SAN DIEGO, July 15, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Biocept, Inc. announced today that it has appointed William G. Kachioff as Senior Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer. As CFO, Mr. Kachioff will be responsible for management of the company’s accounting, finance, treasury, investor relations, risk management and information systems functions. Kachioff has more than 20 years of leadership experience in helping to build life science companies. Prior to joining Biocept, Kachioff was CFO at Althea Technologies, a contract manufacturer of pharmaceuticals.
A graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo, Kachioff began his career as a certified public accountant with Deloitte & Touche LLP in Rochester, NY and Chicago. Mr. Kachioff has held financial management positions in a wide variety of private and public life science companies, including Abbott Laboratories, Clarient, Inc. (a GE Healthcare Company), Vivus, Inc. and Cutera, Inc., where his responsibilities have included oversight of accounting, compliance, investor relations, financial planning, information systems, logistics and capital formation.
David F. Hale, Executive Chairman of Biocept, commented, “Bill’s proven leadership in helping manage life science companies through their initial product commercialization phase will be invaluable to Biocept as we bring OncoCEE-BR for breast cancer, the company’s first clinical laboratory services product for circulating tumor cell analysis, to market. We are delighted to have Bill join our highly experienced management team.” Hale continued,” We believe that Biocept will benefit from Bill’s proven track record and his exemplary combination of business judgment, professional skills and integrity.”
About Biocept, Inc.
Biocept Laboratories, headquartered in San Diego, California, is an advanced CLIA-certified laboratory services company specializing in the capture, detection, enumeration and analysis of circulating tumor cells (CTCs). Biocept’s mission is to enhance the lives of cancer patients through the development of innovative diagnostic products and services. Biocept utilizes innovative, proprietary technologies to deliver clinically relevant and actionable information to physicians that enable better patient care. This includes clinical assessments of CTCs, both prognostic and predictive, which may provide physicians with information highly relevant for the treatment of their patients with cancer.
About OncoCEE
The OncoCEE platform, developed by Biocept, has demonstrated that it can consistently and accurately capture extremely rare cells, like CTCs, which may be present in only 1 of every 50-100 billion blood cells. Biocept obtains patient samples via a simple blood draw, or “liquid biopsy”, instead of relying on traditional biopsy methods or surgical procedures. Biocept differentiates its “liquid biopsy” CTC analysis by combining enhanced prognostic (CTC enumeration) and predictive (e.g., HER2 status) biomarker analyses, information not currently available through commercial laboratories using existing technologies for CTC testing. Other methods to capture, detect and enumerate CTCs rely only on the expression of epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM) and cytokeratins, and do not include molecular biomarker analysis. This approach may exclude CTCs that have undergone intrinsic modifications of their phenotype, such as the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT). EMT may represent a possible explanation for many patients who, despite having aggressive disease, are found negative for the presence of CTCs. OncoCEE has the potential to capture not only epithelial (i.e., EpCAM positive) but also mesenchymal-like CTCs. Additionally, the OncoCEE platform enables evaluation of predictive biomarkers by techniques like immunocytochemistry, fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and mutation analysis. An example is HER2 status, which Biocept determines by FISH. HER2 status is predictive of a potential response to HER2- targeted agents such as Herceptin® and Tykerb®.
For more information, please contact Michael Dunn, Sr. VP, Corporate Development at 888-332-7729 or by visiting Biocept’s web site at http://www.biocept.com . The Company’s website is not part of this press release.
SOURCE Biocept, Inc.
