Our Team

Adjunct Professor of Environmental and Population Health, Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, laboratory of Drs. Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein
EMBO Fellow, Universitat Zurich, Lab of Dr. Ernst Hafen
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, laboratory of Prof. Robert Tjian
B.A. Biology, University of Delaware, Dean’s Scholar

I have enjoyed a reasonably successful career as a thought leader in the pharmaceutical industry at Director level or above and am the founder of Woodland Pharmaceuticals. My research spans biochemical and genetic aspects of preclinical drug discovery for the past 25 years across cardiovascular and metabolic diseases to arthritis and inflammation and cancer. I have participated on teams delivering more than 7 clinical candidates and 3 drugs to the market.

Based largely on my training and experience, Woodland has focused heavily on liver metabolic disease that has led our teams to focus on the metabolic drivers of obesity, inflammation and diabetes leading to liver fibrosis and cirrhosis which culminate in cardiovascular disease and cancers including liver, pancreatic and other cancers. We have established animal models of liver disease pathology that capture the phenotypic drivers of liver fibrosis, including hyperglycemia, obesity, inflammation and fibrosis and have shown that our models progress to precancerous lesions in the liver including HCC. In our models, drugs that slow or prevent fibrosis also greatly attenuate precancerous lesion development.

Our work in liver disease has shown that obesity and fatty liver (FLD) can impact drug metabolism and potentially affect liver toxicity based on experimentaal observation. This may be an important forward-looking area of research as most drugs entering the clinic are going into populations with significant obesity and FLD. Most safety and toxicology studies are done in “normal” animals and thus may not reflect the current clinical trial reality.

I am passionate about advancing treatment of the deadliest cancers including pancreatic and liver cancers as well as glioblastoma. Our team’s approach involves building relevant in vitro and in vivo models and my focus over the past 10 years has been to increase the likelihood of effective translation to the clinic by establishing primary patient tumor models that are much closer to the patient tumor biology than the traditional cancer cell lines. The highest unmet medical need in oncology therapy is cancer recurrence. Our recent efforts to move to experimental systems using patient-derived HCC tumor models in an STTR grant with Mass General Hospital that better inform us of the diversity we are likely to see in the North American clinic, thus improving clinical outcomes to positively impact patient health and make the drug discovery process more productive and efficient.