MCLEAN, Va., April 6, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Perthera, Inc. announced today that it has been building its management team over the past few months to provide an integrated, turnkey “enabling solution” for precision medicine. Additions to the management team include Doug Poretz, Chief Marketing Officer; Steve Rivera, Senior Vice President of Sales; David Halverson, M.D., Vice President and Medical Director; and Subha Madhavan, Ph.D., Chief Bioinformatics Officer. The Company also announced that: Kimberly Mason, MPH has been promoted from Patient Coordinator to Director of Operations, Ashley Blanchard is now Director of Advocacy, and Samuel Leslie, Ph.D. was recruited as Perthera’s Senior IT Team Lead.
“The adoption of precision medicine tactics, in particular for the treatment of cancer, is accelerating. The public is becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of treating every cancer as if it was unique because every cancer is in fact unique,” said CEO and President Andrew Mignatti. “But patients and their care teams require a significant amount of information, administrative help, and technology tools to clearly define the patient’s uniqueness, which is a prerequisite before the most appropriate precision medicine course can be adopted. We are committed to providing all that they require in an integrated, turnkey solution. Our goal is to be the global leader in enabling precision medicine,” he continued.
Mignatti stated that the recruitment of these executives began shortly after the Company received an infusion of $8.7 million in outside capital in July 2016.
“We have now gelled as a tight team executing and building sales, marketing, technology, and development strategies,” Mignatti said. “We are creating and providing all the biological, computational and human resources, tools, data and data management systems that are necessary for cancer care providers to use a comprehensive, plug-and-play solution for providing precision medicine.”
Brief Bios follow:
Doug Poretz, Perthera’s Chief Marketing Officer, started at the company in 2016 as an outside consultant and joined full-time in August. Poretz has led the effort to revamp the website and initiated a comprehensive marketing and public relations campaign. Perthera was a client of Poretz’s communications strategy firm that he established after a short stint trying retirement, which he described as “far from satisfying” after almost five decades in the communications business. He joined Perthera full time after he said that Perthera became so compelling to him that he ended his relationships with other clients to focus solely on Perthera. Before his attempt at retirement, Poretz sold his interest in a privately owned Washington, DC-based communications firm he co-founded in 2000. Shortly after the firm was founded, PRWeek named it one of the nation’s three best small agencies and, three years later named it one of the nation’s best mid-size agencies. The Holmes Report, one of the leading publications for the public affairs industry, named the company the Global Public Affairs Agency of the Year in 2011, around the time Poretz sold his interests in the firm.
Steve Rivera has joined Perthera as Senior Vice President of Sales. He is responsible for the management and strategic direction of Perthera’s sales organization, including clinical, pharmaceutical, and advocacy organization sales. Rivera has more than 20 years of business development, operations, and laboratory experience in the pharmaceutical clinical research industry (Pre-clinical through Phase IV) and clinical diagnostics, across various therapeutic areas (oncology, immunology, CNS, CV, etc.). His expertise played an instrumental role in Perthera’s partnership with Novartis this past January. He has fine-tuned the company’s strategy of providing the integrated enabling solution. “As we began to talk more extensively to health systems executives and oncologists, it became apparent that whereas they valued each of the components of precision medicine, they really wanted one integrated plug-and-play solution that de-burdened them and others from not just one or two of the critical ingredients of precision medicine, but all the technology, science and administrative work that comprise the first steps in providing precision medicine care.”
Dr. David Halverson, M.D. has joined as Perthera’s Vice President and Medical Director. In this post, he oversees the medical integrity and content of Perthera’s Precision Cancer Analysis (PCA). Dr. Halverson joined Perthera after six years at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health where he performed clinical studies in immunotherapy and adoptive T cell therapy in the context of allogeneic stem cell transplantation. Dr. Halverson said that at Perthera he can “help bring the power of precision cancer treatments to more physicians and their patients.”
Dr. Subha Madhavan, Ph.D. is Perthera’s Chief Data Products Officer since January 2017. She is an established and passionate leader with a strong track record of excellence in organizations that operate in the nexus of science, technology and business. Prior to this role, she was advising Perthera’s CEO and CSO on various bioinformatics related projects. Currently, she is leading the development of a suite of clinician- and patient-facing data products including Perthera’s proprietary Oncology Expert System platform, ExpOTM, online virtual tumor board, OnBoardTM, data analytics portal, OnDataTM , and a Patient Engagement Digital Platform (the Perthera App). In addition to working at Perthera, she directs the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI) at the Georgetown University Medical Center and is Associate Professor of Oncology and leads various biomedical informatics efforts including the Georgetown Database of Cancer (G-DOC). She chaired the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Translational Bioinformatics Summit in 2016 and was awarded the Service to America Award in 2005 for developing the first clinical genomics brain tumor database. In her role at Perthera, she leads informatics and product strategy, explaining that “I have the unique opportunity to translate cancer research into practice to make a difference in patients’ lives, which I find incredibly rewarding.”
ABOUT PERTHERA, INC.: Perthera is a founder- and growth fund-backed company founded in 2012 and based in McLean, VA, that has touched thousands of lives by providing precision medicine benefits to cancer patients, their loved ones, and the entire cancer care ecosystem. Perthera leverages biological, computational, and human information and expertise, through a growing family of integrated products and services often using the company’s own proprietary technology, systems, and data. www.perthera.com
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SOURCE Perthera, Inc.
