Chief Scientific Officer

I am an R&D and Business Leader with >25 years of experience in the life science research tool industry, building and inspiring high-performing teams to deliver results with technology innovation, new product development (over 1000 products), over 70 publications, and commercial success. I have worked across disciplines, including engineering, molecular and cellular biology, signal transduction, chemistry, protein biochemistry, sample preparation, and assay development (antibody-, enzyme-, molecular-, or cell-based platforms) to enable basic research, drug discovery, or diagnostics. Critical to this path has been a focus on pioneering novel reagents and assays that enhance our understanding of the complex biology of cells and tissues across disease areas, including cancer, inflammation, neurodegeneration, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. I have a deep understanding of cellular signaling pathways and the critical roles of protein kinases and phosphatases in directing cellular phenotypes in normal and disease states, especially neurodegeneration, which is the focus of this Direct to Phase II SBIR proposal to the NIA. Throughout my professional career, I have worked at both small and large companies and have consistently focused on scientific innovation. I actively interact with customers and key opinion leaders to build strong relationships that foster an understanding of the scientific community's needs and opportunities for innovation, enabling subsequent improvements in discovery. These are critical tenets that I value. In 2015, Dr. Imperiali and I co-founded AssayQuant® Technologies (www.assayquant.com; AQT) with a shared vision of empowering scientists to achieve breakthroughs in drug discovery, reduce suffering, and make the world healthier. Together, we have made tremendous progress in a highly capital-efficient manner to realize our vision through AQT’s mission to create superior assay technologies that deliver information-rich data sets to enable informed scientific decisions. With exclusive rights licensed to AQT, the Sox technology is the engine of AQT’s first assays, branded as PhosphoSens®. Importantly, we are exclusively using a newer version of the Sox technology that enables the generation of superior sensor peptides, enabled by a robust Milestone-based process developed at AQT that uses high-throughput sensor peptide synthesis in a manner that is rapid, cost-effective, and delivers superior performance. With this process, AQT has successfully commercialized catalog assays for over 600 kinase and phosphatase targets, totaling over 800 assays, including PhosphoSens Kinetic and PhosphoSens Red/HTS formats and mutant variants. These assays are integrated into custom testing services for 1) drug potency for reversible and irreversible compounds, including time-dependent inhibition, residence time, and kinact/KI characterization, 2) mechanism of action/inhibition determinations, 3) kinome and phosphatome selectivity profiling, and 4) custom assay development for recombinant and complex samples, including cell lysates and tissue homogenates. AQT has grown into a team of 16 full-time employees, providing products and services to 287 customers (including Biotech, Pharma, Academic, CROs, and distributors). We have built a world-class team and organized around four mission-critical core competencies, including Discovery Technologies (responsible for R&D and PhosphoSens Assay Services), Inventory Management and Automation Services (responsible for compound and sample management, and automation), Commercial Operations (responsible for sales and marketing of PhosphoSens products and services), and Finance (responsible for all financial underpinnings of the organization). The vision for AQT is to build a comprehensive product and services offering in which every catalytically active kinase in the human kinome is matched to PhosphoSens assays optimized in three formats: PhosphoSens Red for high-throughput screening (HTS) applications, PhosphoSens Kinetic for deep enzymological studies of recombinant and purified kinases, and PhosphoSens Lysate for quantitative activity-based functional proteomic studies in complex biological samples, including crude cell lysates and tissue homogenates. This offering empowers researchers and drug developers to realize the advantages of the PhosphoSens technology through direct quantification of kinase activity, yielding information-rich data to support informed decisions across the entire pre-clinical drug discovery continuum and ultimately enabling diagnostics and next-generation targeted therapeutics. This is an extremely rewarding and satisfying accomplishment.