Advisory Board:

Steve Glover
Mr. Glover has over 30 years of business experience in biopharmaceuticals and life sciences. Currently Mr. Glover is Co-Founder and CEO of Variant Pharmaceuticals. Before founding Variant, Mr. Glover was Co-Founder of Coherus Biosciences where he was focused on the business strategy, partnerships, product development efforts and capitalization of the company. Prior to Coherus, he was the President of Insmed Therapeutic Proteins, a biosimilar company, as well as Chief Business Officer of Insmed Incorporated. Prior to Insmed, Mr. Glover held the position of Senior Vice President and General Manager at Andrx Laboratories and Andrx Therapeutics, both divisions of Andrx Corporation. At Andrx Mr. Glover was responsible for the strategy and operation of Andrx Labs which developed and marketed products in metabolic diseases and Men's Health and Andrx Therapeutics which was focused on the development of new controlled release products and contract manufacturing. He earlier held multiple sales, marketing and operational roles at Hoffman LaRoche, Amgen Inc. and IMS Health.  Mr. Glover has multifaceted experience in Fortune 100, start up and entrepreneurial environments. He has demonstrated results in start ups, large cap and turnarounds with a focus on business strategy, commercial execution, product development, business transformation and corporate development. He has over 25 life sciences transactions totaling over $10 billion in licensing and M&A activities and has raised over $200M in capital. His strategic and operational experience includes strategic planning, corporate development, operations management, product development, product marketing and sales management. Currently Mr. Glover serves on the Board of Directors of Variant Pharmaceuticals and InflamaCORE. Additionally Mr. Glover serves as an Executive in Residence at the University of Miami U Innovation Life Sciences Office.

Dr.  Nancy Stagliano
Nancy Stagliano, Ph.D. is currently Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of True North Therapeutics, a rare disease therapeutics company working in the classical complement pathway. Dr. Stagliano has an accomplished career as a biotech leader spanning all aspects of the industry, from company building, discovery research and strategy to global medical affairs and corporate communications.  Previously, Dr. Stagliano was CEO of iPierian, Inc. which applied human iPSCs to model neurodegenerative diseases. The company and its lead antibody program against Tau for the treatment of PSP and Alzheimer’s disease was acquired by BMS in April of 2014 for a total deal value of $725M.  Nancy was the CEO and co-founder of CytomX Therapeutics and a lead inventor on the patents for CytomX’s Probody platform.  In earlier roles with CytomX, she served as the COO of CytomX LLC, which launched CytomX Therapeutics as well as Cynvenio Biosystems.  Before moving to California, Nancy joined the Cambridge, Massachusetts, biotechnology industry in the late 1990s, where she had an eight-year tenure at Millennium Pharmaceuticals and consulted to several local startups.  Dr. Stagliano received her BS in Electrical Engineering and her MS in Biomedical Engineering, both from Drexel University in Philadelphia.  She obtained her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Miami, followed by three years as an independently-funded research fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she studied mechanisms of brain injury after stroke.

Peter Wolfe
Mr. Wolfe has spent his career in various financial roles in the financial services, specialty finance and the pharmaceutical/healthcare industries.  Most recently Mr. Wolfe has spent his time cultivating start-up organizations in various healthcare entities, often dealing with complicated business models to develop a financial framework for success for many of these first of their kind businesses.  Mr. Wolfe has spent the last 17 years of his career in the healthcare industry with almost half of that time spent at Kos Pharmaceuticals, a publicly traded, fully-integrated specialty pharmaceutical company.  Mr. Wolfe assisted in guiding Kos to 27 straight quarters of meeting or exceeding Wall Street quarterly earnings estimates.  Finding the most cost-effective way to run a business through the design of more efficient systems is the hallmark of his career achievements.  Mr. Wolfe has his BBA from the University of Miami and his MBA from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently CFO of Variant Pharmaceuticals and serves as a financial consultant for InflamaCORE, LLC.

Team

Founders:

Robert W. Keane, Ph.D.

Dr. Keane received his bachelor’s degree in biology from SUNY, College at Buffalo and his MS and Ph.D. degree in Genetics from the University of California, Davis.  From 1976-1980 he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Molecular Biology and Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he received a postdoctoral fellowship award from the Leukemia Society of America. Dr. Keane is Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, Neurological Surgery and Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine.  Dr. Keane is actively involved in medical education and is head coordinator of the Neuroscience and Behavioral Science module for MD and MD/MPH students and is the recipient of the “Teacher of the Year” award.  Over the last 30 years his research has focused on understanding the innate immune response in the central nervous system. Dr. Keane is the discoverer of inflammasomes in neurons after central nervous system injury.  Dr. Keane currently is the recipient of a fast-track STTR grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a biologic to treat central nervous system injury and has published extensively in the fields of neuroinflammation and neuroimmunology.  He is a founding member of InflamaCORE, LLC, a company dedicated to treating and diagnosing inflammatory injury and disease.

Juan Pablo de Rivero Vaccari, Ph.D., M.S.B.A.
Dr. de Rivero Vaccari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery & The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, and a Distinguished Faculty Member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience & Aging at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He has studied the innate immune response for over 17 years and was the first to show the involvement of the inflammasome in the Central Nervous System. Dr. de Rivero Vaccari graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S. in Biology from Florida International University where he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society (2004). He then pursued his Ph.D. in Physiology & Biophysics at the University of Miami in the laboratory of Dr. Robert W. Keane (2007) and his post-doctoral fellowship in Neurotrauma at The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis in the laboratory of Dr. W. Dalton Dietrich (2010). He graduated with a M.S. in Business Analytics (2020) from the Miami Herbert Business School of the University of Miami. In addition, he has trained on Biomarker Science at The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center, on Computational Immunology at The Santa Fe Institute and on Space Biology as part of the Spaceflight Technology, Applications and Research Course organized by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In addition, he is Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certified. Dr. de Rivero Vaccari is also a managing member of InflamaCORE, LLC., a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of ZyVersa Therapeutics, Inc, an Associate Editor for the Journal Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience and an Editorial Board Member of the Journal Cells.

 W. Dalton Dietrich, Ph.D.

Dr. Dalton Dietrich is the Kinetic Concepts Distinguished Chair in Neurosurgery and Scientific Director at The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.  He received his Ph.D. in Anatomy from the Medical College of Virginia in 1979 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Pharmacology at Washington University, St. Louis.  Since 1981, Dr. Dietrich has been a faculty member at the University of Miami and is currently Professor of Neurosurgery, Neurology, Biomedical Engineering and Cell Biology. He also serves as Senior Associate Dean for Discovery Science and Co-Director of the Institute for Neural Engineering. Research in Dr. Dietrich’s laboratory is focused on clarifying the pathophysiology of brain and spinal cord injury with the goal of developing new therapies to protect and enhance recovery. His seminal work in therapeutic hypothermia helped change medical practice for treating cardiac arrest, neonatal encephalopathy and other neurological disorders. Dr. Dietrich is a founding member of InflamaCORE, LLC, and collaborates on studies targeting inflammasome signaling to discover novel therapeutic and diagnostic strategies. He has been listed by the Institute of Scientific Information as a “Highly Cited Researcher” placing him in the top 0.5% of all scientists on the impact his research has made on other scientists. He serves on study sections for NIH, Department of Defense and various Foundations. He is Editor-In-Chief of the Journal Therapeutic Hypothermia & Temperature Managementand Deputy Editor of the Journal of Neurotrauma.

Helen M. Bramlett, Ph.D.
Dr. Bramlett received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, her MS in Psychology at the University of Louisiana at Monroe and her MS and PhD degree in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Miami.  She completed her postdoctoral work in Neurotrauma at the University of Miami and she received a postdoctoral fellowship award from the American Heart Association. Dr. Bramlett is actively involved in undergraduate teaching and serves as Director of the Undergraduate Neuroscience Program at the University of Miami.  Dr. Bramlett is an internationally recognized scientist with over 20 years’ experience in the field of CNS injury including the pathophysiology and treatment of traumatic brain and spinal cord injury as well as stroke. Her laboratory focuses on three areas of traumatic research: 1) neuroprotective strategies for traumatic injury, 2) progressive damage after trauma and 3) secondary injury mechanisms of traumatic brain injury. She is currently funded by NIH, DOD, the State of Florida and the VA. Dr. Bramlett serves on several national review boards and is on the Editorial Board of Journal of Neurotrauma and Translational Stroke Research.  She is the Managing Editor of Therapeutic Hypothermia and Temperature Management.  She is a founding member of the InflamaCORE, LLC, a company dedicated to treating and diagnosing inflammatory injury and disease.