SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Alucent Biomedical, a privately held biotechnology company founded to transform the way vascular disease is treated, today announced the formation of its scientific advisory board with seven key appointments: Gary Ansel, M.D.; Elazar Edelman, M.D., Ph.D.; William Gray, M.D.; Larry Kraiss, M.D.; Krishna Rocha-Singh, M.D.; William Sessa, Ph.D. and Craig Walker, M.D.
The board will work closely with the Alucent management team as it continues to advance Natural Vascular Scaffolding™ (NVS), its breakthrough combination drug-device therapy designed to naturally open narrowed or blocked arteries, possibly replacing the need for a stent.
"Alucent is honored to have attracted to its scientific advisory board a team of leading experts in peripheral and cardiovascular disease who see great potential in our novel drug-device therapy,” said Myles Greenberg, M.D., president and chief executive officer of Alucent Biomedical. “The board’s combined expertise will be invaluable as we continue to investigate NVS, a treatment option developed to address the unmet need of patients with difficult-to-treat peripheral artery disease.”
About the Alucent Biomedical Scientific Advisory Board
Dr. Gary Ansel is an internationally renowned interventional expert, both in peripheral vascular and cardiovascular procedures. He has been appointed associate medical director of the OhioHealth Research and Innovation Institute in Columbus, Ohio and is a member of the OhioHealth Research Industry Council. He serves as a primary investigator for numerous national and international research trials, helping to improve care for patients suffering with peripheral and cardiovascular disease. Currently, he is system medical chief, Vascular Program – OhioHealth, and assistant clinical professor of medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Toledo Medical Center, Toledo, Ohio. Dr. Ansel is a founding board member of the Vascular InterVentional Advances Conference (VIVA), a non-profit organization dedicated to education and research of vascular disease. He received his Doctor of Medicine degree from Ohio State University College of Medicine, where he also completed a postgraduate research fellowship in cardiology. He completed his residency and internship at the Medical University of Ohio in Toledo and received his post-fellowship training in peripheral vascular intervention at the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans.
Dr. Elazer R. Edelman is the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and senior attending physician in the coronary care unit at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston. He and his laboratory have pioneered basic findings in vascular biology and the development and assessment of biotechnology. Dr. Edelman directs the Harvard-MIT Biomedical Engineering Center (BMEC), dedicated to applying the rigors of the physical sciences to elucidate fundamental biologic processes and mechanisms of disease. He received Bachelor of Science degrees in bioelectrical engineering and applied biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences from MIT, a Ph.D. in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics from MIT, and a medical degree from Harvard Medical School. After internal medicine training and clinical fellowship in cardiovascular medicine at the BWH, he spent six years as a research fellow in the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School working on the biology of vascular repair. His research interests meld his medical and scientific training to better understand underlying biology for application towards improved clinical decision-making and device design.
Dr. William Gray is system chief of the Division of Cardiovascular Disease at Main Line Health in Philadelphia. He is also the first president of Main Line Health’s Lankenau Heart Institute, the system’s comprehensive cardiovascular medicine and surgery program. Dr. Gray has served in cardiovascular leadership roles for nearly 20 years, most recently as director of endovascular services at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, and from 1999 to 2005 as director of endovascular services at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle. In addition to his leadership positions, Dr. Gray has been instrumental in growing the field of endovascular medicine through clinical training program development and oversight. He started the endovascular fellowship program at Swedish Medical Center in 2002 and served as its director for three years. He then launched and directed the endovascular fellowship program in the Cardiology Division of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Gray is board-certified in internal medicine, general cardiology and interventional cardiology, as well as in endovascular and vascular medicine. He earned his medical degree from Temple University School of Medicine. He completed an internal medicine residency and year as chief resident at Brown University/Rhode Island Hospital, where he also completed cardiology and interventional cardiology fellowships. Dr. Gray is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology and the Society for Cardiac Angiography and Intervention. He serves on the editorial board of JACC Cardiac Interventions and is a reviewer for several other peer-reviewed cardiovascular publications.
Dr. Larry W. Kraiss is Professor of Surgery in the Division of Vascular Surgery at the University of Utah. He is a graduate of Vanguard University of Southern California and Baylor College of Medicine (MD). He took his general and vascular surgical training at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he also spent three years in the vascular biology research laboratory of Dr. Alexander Clowes. He joined the faculty at the University of Utah in 1995, where he established an NIH-funded research laboratory studying translational control in endothelial cells and was named vascular surgery division chief in 2003. He was director of the vascular surgery fellowship program at the University of Utah from 2003 to 2012 and chief of vascular surgery from 2003 to 2018. He maintains a broad-based vascular surgery practice at the University of Utah. More recently, he has developed an academic interest in frailty and its role in pre-operative decision-making in vascular surgery. He is a regular reviewer for research proposals submitted to the NIH, NASA, and the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS). He has served as Chair of the SVS Research Council and Chair of the Arterial Quality Committee of the SVS Patient Safety Organization. He is a past president of the Western Vascular Society. He currently serves as Chair of the Governing Council of the SVS Patient Safety Organization.
Dr. Krishna Rocha-Singh is chief scientific officer for Prairie Heart Institute at St. John’s Hospital in Springfield, Ill. In addition, he is a current co-founding board member of Vascular InterVentional Advances (VIVA), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing the field of vascular medicine and intervention through education and research. In his role as VIVA’s research director, he has collaborated with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in developing several objective performance criteria, which are currently being used by the industry for clinical trials of nitinol stents in symptomatic peripheral arterial disease and resistant hypertension secondary to atherosclerotic renovascular disease. Dr. Rocha-Singh has served as a board or committee member on numerous medical societies including the American College of Cardiology, American Board of Vascular Medicine and Society of Cardiovascular Angiography and Intervention, and is presently on several academic journal editorial boards. Dr. Rocha-Singh has authored over 100 books, book chapters and peer-reviewed manuscripts on coronary and peripheral endovascular interventional subjects. A board-certified cardiologist, he holds a medical degree from the University of California, Los Angeles; completed residency at University of Colorado, Denver; and a Cardiology Fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, California & Scripps Clinic & Research Foundation, La Jolla.
Dr. William Sessa is the Alfred Gilman Professor of Pharmacology and Professor of Medicine (Cardiology); the vice chairman, pharmacology; and the director, Vascular Biology & Therapeutics Program at Yale University. Dr. Sessa’s numerous honors include the American Heart Association’s Established Investigator Award; the Young Alumnus Award; the Experimental Therapeutics’ John J. Abel Award in Pharmacology, a MERIT Award; and The Robert Berne Award from the American Physiological Society. He is also a recipient of the William Harvey Medal. He has served on numerous editorial and scientific advisory boards, and has been an invited lecturer at universities and research institutes throughout the United States, in Latin America and in Europe. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 research articles and papers. Dr. Sessa joined the Yale faculty in 1993 as an assistant professor of pharmacology after post-doctoral work at the University of Virginia Health Sciences Center, School of Medicine. He earned his Ph.D. at New York Medical College and was a postdoctoral fellow and senior scientist at the William Harvey Research Institute at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College in London.
Dr. Craig Walker is the founder and president of the Cardiovascular Institute of the South. Board certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular disease and interventional cardiology, he is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Physicians, the American Society of Cardiovascular Interventionists, the International College of Angiology, the Society for Cardiac Angiography and Interventions, the American College of Chest Physicians, and the Council on Clinical Cardiology. Dr. Walker founded and is the chairman of one of the largest cardiovascular conferences in the nation, New Cardiovascular Horizons, which educates and trains medical professionals on the latest techniques to treat coronary and peripheral vascular disease. He has also been the primary investigator for several cardiovascular and peripheral devices. Dr. Walker serves as a clinical editor of Vascular Disease Management (VDM) and editor for Global Vascular Digest, and he is on the editorial boards for Endovascular Today and the Journal of Endovascular Therapy. He earned his medical degree from the Louisiana State University (LSU) School of Medicine in New Orleans. He began his postgraduate training with an internship and residency at Lafayette Charity Hospital in Lafayette, Louisiana. He continued his training with a cardiology fellowship at Ochsner Foundation Hospital in New Orleans and a research fellowship at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
About Natural Vascular Scaffolding (NVS)
NVS is performed in concert with standard balloon angioplasty technique. Standard angioplasty stretches the vessel wall and causes breakage of the natural links between the native collagen that provides structural stability to the artery. During the interventional procedure, a light-activated, novel small molecule medicine is delivered to the wall of the diseased artery, where it diffuses into the tissue. A NVS light fiber is illuminated, activating the drug. The drug then flexibly re-links the native collagen, a major structural component of the vessel wall, leaving it closer to its natural state. This linking restores the structure and function of the collagen, creating a natural scaffold, or stent, that holds open the vessel. NVS has the potential to improve long-term clinical outcomes in the treatment of PAD. NVS may reduce or eliminate the need for metallic stents in patients with PAD. The therapy also has the potential to reduce treatment complications as well as unnecessary costs to the healthcare system. Its potential durability may also reduce the complications and costs associated with re-interventions.
About Alucent Biomedical
Alucent Biomedical, Inc. is a privately held biotechnology company headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah and is the first company to bring a novel, locally delivered biotechnology treatment to a market traditionally dominated by medical device solutions. Alucent was founded by Avera Health to develop and market Natural Vascular Scaffolding (NVS). NVS is a first-of-a-kind combination drug-device therapy designed to assist the body in naturally opening and maintaining arterial patency. www.alucentbiomedical.com
