Hesperos, Inc. Appoints New Chief Executive Officer, Dr. James Kronauge

“His extensive experience in management at Contract Research Organizations (CRO) will have an immediate impact on Hesperos’ operations and focus.”
- Michael Shuler, Ph.D., President

Earning his Ph.D. in chemistry from MIT in 1987, Jim first served as an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School until transitioning to industry in 1999. His early career focused on developing new drugs in the field of nuclear medicine and resulted in more than 50-peer-reviewed articles along with being the inventor or co-inventor on six issued patents. This includes the discovery and development of Cardiolite®, one of the most financially successful diagnostic tracers, still used today to assess blood flow to the heart for patients with coronary artery disease.

“I’m excited to join Hesperos as we expand the capabilities of the Human-on-a-Chip platform enabling drug developers unprecedented insight into specific disease states, especially for rare diseases, and how the human body will respond to therapeutics.”
- James Kronauge, Ph.D.

Most recently, Dr. Kronauge was the co-founder and president of Tomopath Inc, a CRO focused on accelerating the clinical development of companion diagnostics for new therapeutics. Prior to Tomopath, he was senior director of chemistry at Invicro LLC, a CRO focused on providing pre-clinical imaging services and clinical image analysis software to the pharmaceutical industry to advance drug development of life saving therapeutics. Prior to his positions with Invicro, Dr. Kronauge served as the Executive Director of Research and Development and then as the Vice President of Process Development Chemistry at Molecular Insight Pharmaceuticals Inc, a startup Biotechnology company developing theragnostic drugs for Oncology. The company went public in 2007 and was acquired by Progenics in 2013 and eventually Lantheus in 2021.

“Combining both a strong technical background with proven leadership made Jim the ideal candidate to lead Hesperos into the future.”
- James J. Hickman, Ph.D., Board Chairman and Chief Scientist

About Hesperos

Hesperos, Inc. is a global contract research organization (CRO) providing compound safety and efficacy testing services using its Human-on-a-Chip® platform - the most advanced, multi-organ microphysiological systems available today. Services focus on custom build as well as standard systems composed of human cells representing select organs in a functional, interconnected platform providing pre-clinical insight into how the human body will respond to drug compounds.

The low-volume, serum-free, pumpless platform enables evaluation of both parent compounds and their metabolites. This includes evaluation of both single drug treatments and drug-drug combinations allowing PK/PD extrapolation to in vivo outcomes. The flexible platform can be configured depending on the application, such as: reproducing (and treating) specific disease states, evaluating various drug delivery methods (IV, oral, topical), and investigating both the acute and chronic effects of a given compound or combination.

Our platform can target both rare diseases (there are over 7,000 rare diseases but only 400 have active research programs because of a lack of animal models) and diseases with large patient populations. Efficacy data produced by a Hesperos system for rare disease was included with an IND filed with Sanofi in December 2020 that enabled the application for a Phase II clinical trial in December 2020, that began enrolling patients in April 2021 (#NCT04658472). This is the first time data was used from a microphysiological system which led to the authorization of a clinical trial exclusively using efficacy data from an organ-on-a-chip system marking a significant milestone in validating the technology.

With multiple publications in top-tier, peer reviewed journals including: Nature Scientific Reports, Science Translational Medicine, and Advanced Therapeutics, Hesperos’ Human-on-a-Chip is being successfully used by pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and government entities to better understand specific disease states and the human response to therapeutics.

More information is available at https://hesperosinc.com.

Hesperos and Human-on-a-Chip are trademarks of Hesperos Inc. All other brands may be trademarks of their respective holders.

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