Board

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

AxoSim’s Board of Directors represents over 6 decades of experience as entrepreneurs and senior executives in life sciences and emerging technologies. Perhaps as importantly, our Board believes in AxoSim’s vision and is committed to driving AxoSim’s mission to enable advancements in human health, so that patients in need can get the care they deserve. Behind the passion, the Board collectively has launched 6 successful companies, taken 3 companies public with valuations of over $2B, raised over $325M in financing, and worked for decades in venture capital. Our Board is passionate about making a difference, having served on boards for the National MS Society, community groups, and environmental non-profits.

Lowry Curley, PhD

Board Member

Lowry is co-founder and CEO of AxoSim. He drives the vision and implementation for product […]

Lowry is co-founder and CEO of AxoSim. He drives the vision and implementation for product development and industry adoption of AxoSim’s Nerve-on-a-Chip®, with the goal of making a significant global impact on healthcare and medicine. Lowry received his PhD at Tulane University in biomedical engineering, focusing on tissue engineering and neuroscience. Following several postdocs, including a stint in Belgium, Lowry realized the only way to translate research breakthroughs outside of the lab was through commercialization, which drove him to return to New Orleans and begin AxoSim’s efforts.

David Weiner, MD

Board Member

David has over 20 years of experience in the discovery and clinical development of novel […]

David has over 20 years of experience in the discovery and clinical development of novel therapeutics for neurological disease. David started his career at ACADIA Pharmaceuticals, where, over a ten-year period, he held a series of discovery research and clinical development roles working on multiple CNS therapeutics, most notably Nuplazid/Pimavanserin, a serotonin 5-HT_2A inverse agonist recently approved for the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease related psychosis. David formerly led EMD Serono’s global early clinical development activities in neurology and has extensive experience in rare disease drug development, having served as CMO and Interim CEO for Proteostasis Therapeutics Inc., and most recently as CMO at Lumos Pharma. David received his MD from the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, SUNY at Buffalo, and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Scholar at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda.

Dale Pfost, PhD

Board Member

Dale has 35 years of experience as an entrepreneur, investor and business executive. His areas […]

Dale has 35 years of experience as an entrepreneur, investor and business executive. His areas of expertise include biotechnology, high-tech, corporate strategy and corporate governance. Dale has been the founding CEO of five biotechnology companies, three of which became publicly traded with valuations of over $2 billion. Dale has successfully completed 22 financings with dollar totals in the hundreds of millions. He has overseen M&A deals for nine companies and served as a director at multiple public and private firms. Dale was recently the US-based General Partner at Advent Life Sciences, a leading life sciences venture capital fund in London. He holds a BS degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a PhD in physics from Brown University.

Mike Katz

Board Member

Mike has been with Benson Capital Partners since its inception in 2019. Mike grew up […]

Mike has been with Benson Capital Partners since its inception in 2019. Mike grew up in Silicon Valley and married a New Orleanian. He spent the first half of his career as venture capitalist in San Francisco and New York at firms like Battery Ventures and Greycroft before helping start the U.S. investing practice for both Alibaba and Naspers. He received his undergraduate degree from Georgetown, his MBA from Columbia, and is an adjunct professor at Tulane teaching Entrepreneurial Management.

Benjamin Cappiello

Board Member

Ben leads the commercial side of AxoSim and was a founding advisor to the company […]

Ben leads the commercial side of AxoSim and was a founding advisor to the company before joining full time in 2017. He is an entrepreneur and biomedical engineer. After graduating from Tulane’s biomedical engineering program, he founded Bioceptive, a women’s health company where he remains the CEO, splitting his time with AxoSim. Ben is also the Vice President-Elect of the North American 3R’s Collaborative, focused on reducing the amount of ineffective animal testing done in pharmaceutical development.

Joe Truhe

Board Observer

Joe is a partner with Jefferson Capital, a New Orleans-based private equity firm. In addition […]

Joe is a partner with Jefferson Capital, a New Orleans-based private equity firm. In addition to sourcing, diligence and execution of fund investments, Joe has led the development and implementation of the firm’s Opportunity Zone investment program. Prior to joining Jefferson Capital in 2013 he was a Portfolio Manager with Hancock Whitney Bank in New Orleans where he oversaw the company’s Trust accounts and served as the Energy sector analyst for the Hancock Horizon Funds. Prior to Whitney, he was an analyst and member of the investment committee at HFR Asset Management, a multi-billion dollar hedge fund platform in Chicago, Illinois. There, he reviewed and maintained investment discretion over the firm’s Event Driven and Asia-focused hedge fund allocations. He was also responsible for the expansion of the firm’s Asia-focused fund offerings. Joe holds a BA in Economics from Yale University, and he is a CFA charter holder and a member of the CFA Society of Louisiana.

Scientific Advisory Board

AxoSim’s Scientific Advisory Board comprises both industry and academic expertise. Representative experience includes key opinion leaders in microphysiological systems, organ-on-a-chip models, electrophysiology, toxicology, contract research, and drug discovery. Our members are committed to changing the research paradigm for treatments of some of the most devastating neurodegenerative diseases in the world. These diseases affect hundreds of millions, and we will not want to sit by idly. We couldn’t ask for a better group to guide our mission to revolutionize the way that biopharmaceutical companies develop neurological drugs.

Michael Moore, PhD

SAB Chairman

Michael is co-founder and CSO of AxoSim and an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at […]

Michael is co-founder and CSO of AxoSim and an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tulane University, with nearly 20 years of experience in biomaterials, neuroscience, and regenerative medicine. He received his PhD from the Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and has experience commercializing laboratory-based technology from there as well as from his postdoc with Prof. Robert Langer at MIT. AxoSim is one of three startups to begin in Michael’s lab, though it is the only company he maintains direct involvement.

Dan Kemp, Phd, DABT

SAB Member

Dr. Kemp is the Development Leader at Precision Biosciences where he is focused on the […]

Dr. Kemp is the Development Leader at Precision Biosciences where he is focused on the delivery of cell therapies from preclinical development to commercial products. Dan has worked in several pharma and biotech companies both large and small; including GlaxoSmithKline, Quintiles and Targacept where he focused on the submission of small molecules, biologics, and regenerative medicine products to the FDA or European Medicines Agency. He is an American Board of Toxicology (ABT) Diplomate, on the Board of Directors for ABT, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). He has served as president and councilor for multiple specialty sections with the Society of Toxicology and on the program and education committee for the American College of Toxicology. Dan received his PhD in Toxicology from UNC and his BS in Biochemistry from Michigan State University.

Helena Hogberg, PhD

SAB Member

Helena Hogberg PhD is the Deputy Director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing […]

Helena Hogberg PhD is the Deputy Director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore MD. She received her PhD in Toxicology from the Physiology Department at Stockholm University, Sweden in 2009. The scientific work during her Ph.D. was performed at the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM), European Commission, Ispra, Italy and aimed to develop new in vitro approaches to detect chemicals with developmental neurotoxicity (DNT) potential with a focus on gene expression and electrical activity recordings.
Together with Dr. Hartung she started the current laboratory at CAAT as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2010. She was later promoted to faculty position and was appointed the Deputy Director of the Center in the beginning of 2016. Her current research activity is still in the field of DNT with the use of emerging tools such as 3D organotypic cell models, induced pluripotent stem cells and omics (transcriptomics and metabolomics) approaches. She was recently appointed to the Expert Group on DNT of the International Council on Animal Protection (ICAPO) in OECD Programmes.

C. Anthony Altar, PhD

SAB Member

C. Anthony Altar has 35 years experience discovering and developing drug and gene-based therapies for […]

C. Anthony Altar has 35 years experience discovering and developing drug and gene-based therapies for brain disorders. He led the team that discovered Abilify, the highest grossing drug worldwide in 2014, for patients with depression, bipolar disease, and schizophrenia. As CSO at Assurex Health, he created pharmacogenomic products for ADHD and pain, and developed the clinically-validated GeneSight psychiatric drug selection product, provided to over a million patients. As CSO and now Senior Scientific Advisor at Verge Genomics, he helped raise $30M to identify novel targets and compounds for ALS and Parkinson’s disease. At Regeneron, he co-founded their vision program and there, as well as at Genentech, pioneered studies on neurotrophic factors. Tony is chairman of the program committee at ASENT and is a member of ACNP. He is now founding Splice Therapeutics to develop RNA editing molecules for inherited and acquired genetic diseases and has published 135 papers in journals including Science and Nature.