Advisory Board
Roman Ajzen, JD - Financial Advisor
Roman is a Vice President at Forrestal Capital, a family office, where he oversees direct investments in the CPG, medical device and technology sectors. Prior to joining Forrestal Capital in 2020, he was general counsel for Latin America for Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets and a corporate lawyer in Davis Polk’s New York and London offices. He has participated in numerous complex M&A and capital market transactions involving public and private companies across the US, Europe and Latin America. He has a BA in philosophy from Stanford University and a JD from Stanford Law School..
Michael Givertz, MD - Cardiology Advisor
Dr. Michael M. Givertz is the Medical Director of Heart Transplant and Mechanical Circulatory Support Program and a heart failure/transplant specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). He is also past chair of the New England Consortium of Heart Transplant and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). He received his medical degree from HMS. He then completed an internal medicine residency program at BWH and a chief residency program in internal medicine at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in West Roxbury (now VA Boston Healthcare System). He completed two fellowships at BWH: one in cardiovascular disease and the other in heart failure/transplant. He is board certified in cardiovascular disease, advanced heart failure and transplant cardiology. Dr. Givertz’s clinical interests include heart transplant, mechanical circulatory support, peripartum cardiomyopathy, heart failure and secondary pulmonary hypertension. His research focuses on cardiorenal interactions in acute heart failure and novel tools to assess cardiac function and guide therapy. He has authored over 150 peer-reviewed publications and received research funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Evangelia Kranias, PhD - Calcium Channel & Diagnostic Marker Advisor
Dr Kranias is the Hanna Professor, Distinguished University Research Professor, Director of Cardiovascular Biology and Professor of Pharmacology and Systems Physiology at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. Research studies in the Kranias lab over the past four decades have focused on the role of Ca2+-handling and Ca2+-signaling in the regulation of myocardial function and survival in health and disease. In particular, Dr Kranias has focused on unraveling the mechanisms underlying the impaired regulation of sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+-cycling in cardiac and skeletal myopathies to identify novel therapeutic targets. She has used an integrative approach with state-of-the-art techniques, spanning the molecular, biomedical, cellular, intact organ and intact animal levels. Importantly, she has generated and characterized a large number of genetically altered mouse models, affording significant insights into the regulation of cardiac function, apoptosis, necrosis and autophagy. The Kranias laboratory studies have been extended from the bench to the clinic, including the identification of human variants in key Ca-cycling genes that may serve as potential prognostic or diagnostic markers for the development of arrhythmia and heart failure. Her pioneering research findings have been published in top tier journals and her projects were funded from NIH for almost four decades.
Dr. Kranias has organized, chaired and spoke at numerous National and International meetings. She has also been a dedicated mentor of over 70 Ph.D. students and post-doctoral fellows. She has received many National and International awards and honors, including the AHA Distinguished Scientist Prize, the 2019 AHA Basic Research Prize, the George E. Brown Memorial Lecture, the International Society of Heart Research Peter Harris Award Lecture and the President’s Award Lecture, and was elected as a corresponding member of the Athens Academy. Dr. Kranias has also served on the Councils of the Biophysical Society and the ISHR (International and NA), the AHA Research Committee, and as Associate Editor or Editorial Board member of several journals as well as reviewer on numerous panels and committees.
Jeffery Molekentin, PhD - Drug Target Modeling Advisor
Jeffery D. Molkentin, PhD. Is a Professor in the Department of pediatrics, University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children's Hospital. He is also the Division Director of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology and co-director of the Heart Institute. He received his B.S. from Marquette University in Milwaukee Wisconsin (USA) in 1989 and his PhD from the Medical College of Wisconsin in 1994, after which he performed postdoctoral training with Dr. Eric Olson in Texas (USA) from 1994-1997. Dr. Molkentin has published over 420 original articles during this time, he has a Scopus H-index of 125 and Google Scholar h-index of 145. Dr. Molkentin was a Pew Scholar early in his career and a full investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the USA from 2008-2021. He has won several awards such as the Louis N and Arnold M Katz award to young investigators and more recently the Basic Research Prize, both of the American Heart Association. Dr. Molkentin also won the Lucian Award from McGill University. He has served on NIH study section and was an organizer of various national and international scientific meetings.
Moheb Nasr, PhD - Regulatory Advisor
Dr Nasr currently serves as a senior regulatory advisor for several chemical and biopharmaceutical companies in the US, Europe, and Asia. Dr. Nasr retired from GSK in August 2017 where he was responsible for the development and the execution of GSK’s global CMC regulatory strategy. Prior to joining GSK, Dr. Nasr spent over 22 years at the US FDA. At the FDA, Dr. Nasr was the head of FDA/CDER CMC regulatory office. Dr. Nasr represented the FDA and PhRMA at ICH and was instrumental in the development of the Quality by Design (QbD) concept and several regulatory ICH guidelines. Dr. Nasr obtained his Pharmacy and MS degrees at the University of Cairo, Egypt, and his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Dr. Nasr is an elected Fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) and the recipient of AAPS Regulatory Science Achievement Award and numerous academic and US Government awards..