Management Team

Kenneth Slepicka, our chief executive officer, has an MBA from the JL Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.  Mr. Slepicka has more than twenty years experience in the financial industry, most notably as a director of several public companies as well as a senior consultant/advisor to several start-up initiatives including biotechnology and pharmaceutical training companies.  Most recently, Mr. Slepicka was a portfolio manager for a hedge fund focusing on the management of several private and public companies.  Mr. Slepicka spent 15 years as a Portfolio and Risk Manager for UBS and was President of the bank’s U.S. subsidiary, UBS Futures Inc.

Dr. Thomas Piccariello, our president and chief science officer, has a B.S. in biology and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech).  He has experience in the fields of synthetic chemistry, metallurgy, electrochemistry, plant enzymology, chemical manufacturing and pharmacology. In addition to serving as the lead scientist for two pharmaceutical start-up companies (Insmed and New River Pharmaceuticals), Dr. Piccariello founded and ran his own contract research and contract manufacturing companies, which he later sold.  Dr. Piccariello has 23 patents and patent applications to his credit, 18 of which deal with novel drug delivery technologies.

John Tinkham, our general counsel and vice president of development, graduated from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley and from Northwestern University with a B.A. in economics.

Dr. John Price, our senior research scientist, has a B.S. in chemical engineering from Washington University and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Iowa State University.  Dr. Price has over 15 years of discovery and development experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.