Slone Partners Recruits Chief Scientific Officer for Enveda Biosciences
April 30, 2021 – Over the past few months, numerous healthcare and life sciences organizations have turned to executive search firms to find new leaders. In the era of COVID-19, the sector has been a burgeoning area for executive search firms to ply their trade. Recently, life sciences-focused search firm Slone Partners placed Sotirios Karathanasis as the new chief science officer at Enveda Biosciences. “Dr. Karathanasis is a highly accomplished and respected scientist, researcher and innovator with broad drug discovery and development experience whose intellect and insights will advance Enveda’s impressive drug discovery portfolio,” said Tara Kochis-Stach, president of Slone Partners. “He will make a terrific addition to the company’s executive leadership team.”
“Sotirios will bring critical expertise and proven executive leadership to our mission of developing a world-class portfolio in cardiovascular, metabolic and other complex diseases that have proven refractory to conventional methods,” said Viswa Colluru, founder and CEO of Enveda. “His experience will help our team of biologists and medicinal chemists deliver validated, first-in-class drug candidates inspired by unique chemical starting points.”
Dr. Karathanasis is former chief science officer of endocrine and cardiovascular research at Lilly Research Laboratories and has held several other key positions in the pharmaceutical industry including vice president and head of biosciences at AstraZeneca, and director of cardiovascular pharmacology at Pfizer Global Research & Development. Over the course of his career, Dr. Karathanasis has led drug discovery teams with as many as 250 scientists across a wide scope of geographic locations, disciplines and functional interfaces. He holds 23 patents and has published more than 100 original manuscripts, review papers, and book chapters. Dr. Karathanasis received his doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Georgia and served his post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School.
In his new role, Dr. Karathanasis will lead the company’s small molecule drug discovery portfolio and work with Enveda’s preclinical team to advance the company’s lead programs for NASH and Wilson’s disease, among other programs.
“Having generated the largest dataset of medicinally-important plant metabolomes purpose-built for machine learning, Enveda is unlocking a new era of small molecule discovery,” said Dr. Karathanasis. “I see tremendous potential in Enveda’s technology to address challenging targets and fundamental disease-causing processes.”
Related: Slone Partners Recruits Chief Business Officer for InterVenn Biosciences
Enveda Biosciences is a biotechnology company building the first high-resolution chemical map of the natural world to tackle the toughest problems in drug discovery. Enveda’s platform is an advanced drug discovery search engine for dark chemical space, building on years advancements at the intersection of metabolomics and machine learning. Complementing its breakthrough technology, Enveda’s team includes seasoned drug hunters with decades of experience in the pharmaceutical industry working alongside world-leading data scientists.
Nationally Recognized
Slone Partners is a nationally recognized senior-level recruitment provider that specializes in delivering executive, management and leadership talent for the diagnostic, biopharmaceutical, healthcare information technology and laboratory testing industries. The firm has offices in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. Recently, the firm was included among Hunt Scanlon Media’s “Top 50 Healthcare & Life Sciences Search Firms.”
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Ms. Kochis-Stach joined Slone Partners in 2004, bringing to the firm over a decade of healthcare experience. Her past sales career with industry leaders such as VERSYSS, American Medical Laboratories and Quest Diagnostics covered a wide variety of healthcare segments, including information technology, medical records, and the diagnostic and laboratory testing industry. Prior to healthcare, Ms. Kochis-Stach recruited executive and management talent in the banking and finance sector.
Recent Placement
The firm recently placed Mike Spigarelli as chief medical officer of Lumen Bioscience in Seattle. “As an extremely skilled industry leader with three decades of medical, pharmaceutical and academic experience, Mike Spigarelli has a thorough understanding of clinical affairs, drug development and regulatory strategy,” said Ms. Kochis-Stach, of Slone Partners. “He will be a tremendously valuable addition to the Lumen Bio executive team at a time when the company is advancing a number of exciting new investigational biologic drugs.”
Related: Slone Partners Places Chief Medical Officer at Goldfinch Bio
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
