The Children’s Tumor Foundation Business Advisory Council is composed of accomplished industry experts from pharma, biotech, and venture capital who provide strategic direction to the Foundation, advise on innovative business opportunities, and assess program effectiveness.
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Alex focuses on investments in the biopharmaceuticals industry, especially in pharmaceuticals, generics, drug delivery and specialty pharma and biotechnology. He joined H.I.G. BioVentures as a Managing Director in January 2016. He currently serves on the board of directors for Clarus Therapeutics and Keystone Dental.
Prior to H.I.G., Alex was spent 13 years making similar investments at Thomas, McNerney & Partners. Previous board seats included Auspex Pharmaceuticals (sold to Teva), InnoPharma (sold to Pfizer), Quinnova (sold to Amneal), Celator (public), Zogenix (public), Tranzyme (merged with Ocera) and observer roles at PCI Pharma Services and Coley Pharmaceutical (sold to Pfizer).
Prior to Thomas, McNerney, Alex spent 11 years in the research department at Hambrecht & Quist (and its successor firms Chase H&Q and JPMorgan). During his tenure at H&Q, Alex led research teams covering the biotechnology, specialty pharmaceuticals, large-cap pharmaceuticals, drug delivery and diagnostics industries. After the merger of Chase H&Q and JPMorgan, Alex became the firm’s healthcare strategist. He was named twice in The Wall Street Journal All-Star Analysts Survey, including his last year at JPMorgan in which he placed in all three categories: stock picking (#1 in pharmaceuticals), earnings estimate accuracy (tied for #2), and ‘home run’ hitting (#8 across all industries).
Alex is the co-chair of the Industry Advisory Board of the Children’s Tumor Foundation, an advisor for the Partnership Fund of NYC, which manages a bioaccelarator to advance local healthcare research, and is on the Life Sciences Council for Springboard Enterprises, a group that assists women entrepreneurs. He is also a board member for the Greenwich Council of the Boy Scouts of America.
He graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Montse is a visionary and strategically driven C-Suite leader with extensive international experience in the top Pharma industry. For over three decades Montse has proven track record on quality, operations excellence , sustainability and business transformation. She has been leading high performance teams to build successful organizations, driving excellence in operations, innovation and transformation. Montse was the first Chief Sustainability Officer with a previous role as Chief Quality Officer at Novartis.
Deep understanding of a highly regulated and complex environment with competences in numerous therapeutics including Cell Gene , Radioligand, Biologics, Vaccines and Medical Devices. Proven ability to successfully deal with uncertainty, identify patterns, manage risks and crises effectively and navigate complex stakeholder’s landscapes across different business units.
With a transformational mindset and strong future orientation, has proven success in elevating organizations from transactional to highly strategic, focusing on value creation and impact , Strong understanding on business transformation at different scale companies and functions to maximise long-term shareholder value.
A visionary thinker with an aptitude for translating strategy into reality, through a collaborative approach, strong communication and storytelling. Acknowledged for building and shaping diverse and inclusive organizational cultures and mobilizing people.
Montse currently serves as Advisory Board and Member of Executive Council of 09 Solutions, Inc, is scientific advisor of Nordics Capital and Sustainability Fellow at Deloitte. Her passion and commitment is to continue supporting companies that are purpose led with a positive impact on human and planetary health
Montse was part of the awarded 100 Top Women in Sustainability in 2022 and 2023 and also received an award for the Top 100 Sustainability Leader. With a passion for education, Montse as a professor at the University of Barcelona in Spain for over 8 years.
As Co-Director of CAS, Dr. Barker designs and implements new research models specifically directed toward addressing major problems in biomedical research and biomedicine. CAS at ASU serves as an organizing construct to understand and solve multi-dimensional problems in the biomedical and health sciences. These multi-sector networks are the foundation for the development of new research models that leverage convergent knowledge, innovative teams and novel funding approaches to understand and improve the diagnosis and treatment of complex diseases such as cancer. The focus for much of these efforts is based in understanding these multi-factorial diseases as complex adaptive systems. Several initiatives are underway including: NBDA, a non-profit trans-sector think tank dedicated to transforming biomarker discovery and development; a “next generation” clinical trial, GBM AGILE (Adaptive, Global, Innovative, Learning Environment) for Glioblastoma (GBM), the most common and deadly of the adult brain tumors; biomarker qualification programs; and ongoing solutions oriented workshops and think tanks.
Prior to joining ASU, Dr. Barker served several years as the Deputy Director and Deputy Director for Strategic Scientific Initiatives for the NCI, National Institutes of Health (NIH). At the NCI Dr. Barker developed and led or co-led a number of trans-disciplinary programs including: Nanotechnology Alliance for Cancer, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA); and the Clinical Proteomics Technologies Initiative. Dr. Barker also led a multi-year effort to plan and implement a new trans-disciplinary research construct to enable the convergence of the physical sciences (physics, mathematics, physical chemistry and engineering) with cancer biology. Under her leadership, the NCI developed major initiatives in bio specimen science and bioinformatics. She was founding co-chair of the NCI-FDA Interagency Task Force (IOTF) and founding co-chair of the Cancer Steering Committee of the FNIH Biomarkers Consortium (FNIH-BC). She also oversaw the NCI’s international cancer research programs, including pilot programs in Latin America and China.
Sarah Bhagat is General Partner at Sofinnova Investments, where she focuses on biopharmaceutical investments. Sarah is currently the chairwoman of Atsena and is a member of the board of directors for Inozyme (INZY) and Aeovian and a former board of director for Promedior, acquired by Roche for up to $1.4B. Sarah additionally played a central role in Sofinnova’s investments in Apellis (APLS), Pionyr, and YmAbs (YMAB). Most recently Sarah was recognized by Biocom in 2020 as one of ten life sciences trailblazers under 40.
Prior to joining Sofinnova in 2017, Sarah was a Venture Fellow for Canaan Partners. Sarah was also a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Stanford University. As a graduate student at Yale, Sarah worked with Dr. Stephen Strittmatter, her thesis advisor and co-founder of Axerion Therapeutics, to identify novel targets and develop therapeutics for CNS injury and psychiatric disorders. Prior to Yale, Sarah worked as a research assistant for The Rockefeller University. Before her time at Rockefeller, Sarah was a Clinical Research Coordinator at Massachusetts General Hospital in the Bipolar Clinic and Research Program.
Sarah received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Yale University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Sarah is also an alumna of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business Ignite Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program. Sarah is on the board of Stanford’s Neuroscience Translate Oversight Committee.
Daniela Brunner, PhD, is the Chief Innovation Officer of PsychoGenics Inc (PGI), a biotech focused on the development of novel therapeutic treatments for CNS disorders, where she leads the data science, software development, and information technology teams. A major focus of her work has been the establishment and automation of rodent behavioral tests and novel high throughput preclinical platforms using computer vision and machine learning algorithms to comb behavioral signatures for phenotyping, drug screening and systems biology approaches. As head of Behavioral R&D at PsychoGenics Dr. Brunner developed drug discovery platforms including SmartCube® – PGI’s proprietary mouse-based phenotypic platform, that led to the development of a novel, non-dopaminergic, first-in-class drug for schizophrenia. This drug, SEP-363856, showed robust therapeutic effects in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia against positive, negative, depressive and general psychopathology symptoms. SmartCube® employs computer vision and AI to extract and analyze behavioral data for CNS disorders. Dr. Brunner was also in charge of large projects focused on back-translation of anti-smoking cessation medication, preclinical cognitive assessment, and studies in neurodegeneration, psychiatry, and autism, and is currently leading the development of next generation AI drug discovery platforms.
In 2015 Dr. Brunner founded Early Signal Foundation, now a Digital Health organization, subsidiary of Cohen Veterans Bioscience, for the development of digital health technology for rare disorders. She also founded Science Forward LLC, a consulting firm working on preclinical and clinical aspects of treatment and technology development. Dr. Brunner aims to establish analytical systems that integrate human behavioral and “omics” readouts for health care and monitoring in rare disorders, connecting genomic information with behavioral domains, specially those passively captured with wearable sensors. She also works with the Tuberous Sclerosis Alliance, collaborating on a consortium of industrial and academic institutions and experts, and helping with the development of novel therapies for this devastating disorder.
Dr. Brunner received her Masters of Science in biology from Buenos Aires University, Argentina, and her PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge, UK. She did her postdoctoral work at Columbia University and the New York Psychiatric Institute.
Dr. Brunner has worked on the validation of preclinical models of developmental, psychiatric and neurodegenerative disease models for the last 20 years. She has published more than 70 research papers and many book chapters, and is an inventor in numerous patents.
Trinna Cuellar is the Vice President of Biology and Head of R&D at Tally Health. She brings over 20 years of drug discovery, research, and leadership experience to CTF. Prior to Tally Health, she was at Gotham Therapeutics where, in addition to establishing their epitranscriptomics cancer biology program and lab, she helped raise 54 million in Series A financing round before they were acquired by 858 Therapeutics. Post-acquisition, she ran the New York site of Gotham, which became a wholly-owned subsidiary of 858 Therapeutics, and joined the 858 management team. Prior to that, she was at Genentech (Roche), where she developed novel RNA-based drugs and led drug discovery and research efforts working on cancer, neurodegeneration, and muscle degeneration. She also developed new research technologies, such as an Antibody-RNA drug delivery system, whole genome CRISPR libraries, and discovered a novel epigenetic drug target for leukemia. She began her career at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), working on cancer immunotherapy in the oncology group and novel drug discovery in the comparative genomics group.
She has led teams in both large corporate and lean start-up environments to innovate the most cutting edge tools, medicines, and solutions to help untangle some of the most challenging problems and has won numerous awards for her efforts. Her work has been published in leading journals, such as Nature, Neuron, and Cancer Cell, Aging Cell, and featured in popular media .
Trinna has a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). While there, she was supported by several fellowships. She was an ARCS scholar, a Genentech/Sandler Family Fellow, and an NIH fellow. She obtained an M.B.A. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Dr. Friend is the President of Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit research organization dedicated to redefining biomedical research through open systems, incentives and norms. He is an authority in the field of cancer biology and a pioneer in the field of genetics of gene expression, using large datasets and integrating systems biology approaches to complex diseases.
He actively leads an interdisciplinary team of network, systems and computational biologists working to improve biomedical research collaborations and develop predictive disease models based on multi-layered patient data. Under his leadership, Sage Bionetworks develops technology platforms for large scale data analysis, governance platforms to permit data sharing and reuse, runs challenges to solve complex biomedical problems and performs cutting edge computational biology and research.
More recently, Dr. Friend has led efforts to empower participants in clinical research through the development of smartphone apps. He was the medical consultant to Apple on the development of ResearchKit, an open-source framework built for iOS devices to allow researchers and developers to create powerful apps for medical research. He is the lead investigator for three separate mobile health research studies, and Sage Bionetworks has been instrumental in the development of a reusable governance infrastructure and backend data services that support a host of other mobile research studies hosted by Sage Bionetworks. Dr. Friend’s leadership in the analysis of these novel data alongside standard clinical trials reveal the power that these such mobile health research studies can have in gaining an understanding of health and disease.
Previously, Dr. Friend was Senior Vice President and Franchise Head for Oncology Research at Merck & Co., Inc. where he led Merck’s Basic Cancer Research efforts. Formerly, Dr. Friend along with Dr. Leland H. Hartwell founded and co-led the “Seattle Project” at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, an advanced institute for drug discovery and later they co-founded Rosetta Inpharmatics with Dr. Leroy Hood.
Dr. Friend received his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy, his PhD in chemistry and his MD from Indiana University. He did his clinical training at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Dana-Farber Cancer Research Institute in Boston and held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dr. Friend has been a senior advisor to the NCI and several biotechnology companies, a Trustee of the AACR and recently was made an AAAS Fellow. Dr. Friend was named an Ashoka Fellow and he was honored as a White House Champions of Change Recipient for Open Science for his innovative work at Sage Bionetworks.
Christopher Powala is a serial entrepreneur with over 37 years of experience in the pharmaceutical/biotech industry. Mr. Powala joined NFlection Therapeutics as President & CEO in June 2019 and now serves as a member of the board of directors. Mr. Powala co-founded and served as Chief Development Officer of Aclaris Therapeutics until his retirement in June 2019. He also served as the Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer of Vicept Therapeutics, Inc. from 2009 until its acquisition by Allergan, Inc. in July 2011. Prior to joining Vicept Therapeutics, Inc., from 2008 to 2009, he served as Vice President, Clinical Operations & Global Regulatory Affairs for Vital Therapies, Inc., a biotechnology company. From 1993 to 2008, Mr. Powala was with CollaGenex Pharmaceuticals, Inc, a dermatology-focused specialty pharmaceutical company, where he served as Vice President, Drug Development and Regulatory Affairs. Previously, Mr. Powala held various positions in product development and regulatory affairs at Wyeth Laboratories, Inc. Mr. Powala received his Post-Baccalaureate Diploma in General Management from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and his bachelor’s degree in Biology from State University of New York-Regents College.
Mr. Stanicky currently serves as the Chief Financial Officer for Click Therapeutics, a company focused on bringing digital drugs to the market. He previously served as Managing Director, Global Equity Research at RBC Capital Markets, focusing on the specialty pharmaceuticals sector. Prior to that he spent most of his 20-year Wall Street career at Goldman Sachs in a similar capacity. He also spent two years at Citigroup Global Asset Management as an investor on the buyside and is a former Board member of TherapeuticsMD (NASDAQ: TXMD).
His research coverage experience within the healthcare sector has been broad, spanning large cap and specialty pharmaceuticals, the healthcare supply chain, contract research, and healthcare technology.
Ed Stern was a private practice attorney in Newtonville, MA. A sole practitioner in association with seven other attorneys, his practice included representation of major business interests in the public and private sectors,as well as administrative agency and court room representation. Other areas of practice included criminal, juvenile, corporate organization, real property, estate planning, and civil representation.
Mr. Stern currently holds positions as an Assistant Dean for Prelaw Advising at Boston University and as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He has previously been President of the Massachusetts Funding Group, Inc., a Real Estate Developer at Triangle Development Corporation, an Environmental Engineer for the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration, and a member of United States Army Reserve.
Mr. Stern earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering from Tufts University in 1968, and a Juris Doctor from Boston University School of Law in 1972. Mr. Stern lives in Waban, MA with his wife, Ann Swanson Stern, Ph.D. They have two children, Jared and Jordan Stern. He has been involved with the Children’s Tumor Foundation since 1988 as Pro Bono Counsel to the Medical Advisory Committee.
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