Dr. Pena has significant experience in biotechnology business ventures, working at the board level to build companies from an early stage, and extensive scientific expertise. Dr. Pena received a B.A. in Economics from Duke University and an M.B.A and a Ph.D. in Immunology, under the guidance of Dr. Craig Thompson, both from the University of Chicago. He worked with ARCH Venture Partners, a leading venture investor in technology companies, from 1999 until he joined Ancora in July 2002. While at ARCH he concentrated on investments in the life and materials sciences and was a board observer at Alfalight and Surface Logix. Prior to joining ARCH Venture Partners, Dr. Pena was a project manager at ARCH Development Corporation, where he focused on licensing and seed/early stage company formation in the biotechnology/life sciences areas.
Dr. Campbell has significant experience in carbohydrate synthesis, biotechnology start-ups and all phases of drug discovery and clinical development. Dr. Campbell joined Ancora in November 2006 as Vice President of Research & Development bringing with him more than 12 years of pharmaceutical and biotechnology drug discovery and development. Dr. Campbell is an organic chemist with formidable expertise in carbohydrate chemistry.
Prior to joining Ancora, he served as Vice President of Preclinical Development at Surface Logix, Inc. where he was instrumental in bringing two drugs from concept into Phase II clinical trials and in advancing several other programs from concept to the pre-clinical development stage. He previously served as Director of Medicinal Chemistry and Technical Operations at Insmed, Inc. where he was responsible for all technical aspects of development, including drug substance and drug product manufacturing, analytical and bioanalytical chemistry and toxicology, of a small molecule carbohydrate drug candidate for the treatment of insulin resistance. Dr. Campbell began his career at Boehringer-Ingelheim Research (Laval, Canada) as a medicinal chemist working on a variety of anti-viral discovery programs. Dr. Campbell earned an undergraduate degree in Chemistry in 1988 from St. Francis Xavier University, completed his doctoral degree in organic chemistry at Queen’s University (Canada) and conducted post-doctoral research in carbohydrate chemistry and natural product synthesis at Duke University.
Dr. Christ is considered one of the leading carbohydrate chemists in the industry and has advanced two carbohydrate-enabled drugs into Phase III clinical trials, one of which is in an NDA evaluation stage. Dr. Christ earned an undergraduate degree in Chemistry in 1975 and a doctoral degree in Organic Chemistry in 1981 both from the University of South Florida. As a Merck, Sharp and Dohme Fellow, Dr. Christ completed a post-doctorate under the guidance of Yoshito Kishi at Harvard University. His research involved the absolute structural assignment and total synthesis of palytoxin. After an assistant professorship at Clarkson University, Dr. Christ joined and was completely responsible for establishing all facets of the newly founded Eisai Research Institute in 1988 and achieved the position of Executive Vice-President. While at Eisai, Dr. Christ was directly responsible for the synthesis, scale-up and cGMP manufacturing of two novel carbohydrate-enabled drug candidates; each candidate is currently in advanced Phase II or Phase III clinical trials. Dr. Christ received the Eisai Award for Scientific Achievement for his discovery of a new class of stabilized LPS antagonists for the treatment of septic shock, the second generation molecule is one of the drug candidates in clinical trials. Most recently, Dr. Christ was the Chief Scientific Officer for TransLion, a spin-off venture based on technology from Harvard University. Dr. Christ established chemistry operations and is focusing on chemistry platform development and scale-up capabilities at Ancora.
Dr. Plante received a B.S. degree in chemistry from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1995. He then attended Columbia University where he earned a M.A. in chemistry in 1997. In 1998, Dr. Plante became the first member of Peter Seeberger’s laboratory at M.I.T., attaining his Ph.D. in chemistry in 2001. While at M.I.T., Dr. Plante developed the chemistry and instrumentation that enabled the first demonstration of an automated solid-phase carbohydrate synthesizer. In total, Dr. Plante’s doctoral research led to more than 10 peer reviewed scientific publications and several patents. At Ancora, Dr. Plante has been integral in transitioning the technology platform from academic research into a commercially viable discovery chemistry platform and has helped to establish several vaccine and therapeutic discovery programs within the company.
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