Management Team
Seasoned in therapeutic technologies, with decades of company development expertise.
Eric Schuur, PhD
Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder
Dr. Schuur has over 25 years of experience as a scientist, manager, and consultant. He has deep scientific expertise from the bench level to the clinic at places such as UCLA, Stanford, and the Scripps Research Institute. Dr. Schuur has extensive industry experience with early stage companies, including Calydon, Inc. and Asthmatx, Inc. where he has managed preclinical and clinical research teams. As a consultant, he provided medical and scientific strategy, communications, and information management services for companies in the the regenerative medicine, gene therapy, genomics, diagnostics, and biomarkers fields.
Dr. Schuur has a PhD in Experimental Pathology from the UCLA School of Medicine and completed an NIH-sponsored post-doctoral fellowship at the Scripps Research Institute. Dr. Schuur serves as an Adviser to the Stanford School of Medicine SPARK Program and as a Mentor in the Stanford University Office of Technology Licensing Innovation Farm Team Program.
Mark Chao, MD, PhD
Board Member, Co-Founder
Dr. Chao is a board-certified physician in internal medicine and a trained hematologist with a strong clinical network at Stanford University Hospitals. Dr. Chao has clinical development experience in bringing cancer therapeutics through to successful IND filing and has contributed to successful early stage clinical trial execution within the academic university setting.
Dr. Chao has over 15 years of experience in stem cell biology, immunology, and cancer biology research, including the discovery of a novel target for cancer immunotherapy that is now in clinical development. He is a co-founder of Forty Seven, Inc., a clinical stage immuno-oncology company. He earned his MD and PhD in cancer biology from Stanford University and completed his internal medicine residency and hematology fellowship at Stanford. He is currently a visiting scholar in the Division of Hematology at Stanford University.
Claudia Preziosi
Head of Business Development and Operations
Claudia holds a master’s degree with Honors in International Business and Development from the University of Parma, Italy. She is also a Stanford-trained project manager.
She combines experience both in large corporations and the startup world. Early in her career, she worked in the International Business Unit for San Pellegrino, Nestlé in Milan, where she managed a portfolio of 9 markets, oversaw several product launches, and was a Lean Methodology Pillar. In her latter role, she was the Operations and Program manager of StartX, the accelerator at Stanford (+700 startups, 16 Unicorns), and gained an extensive background in the Bay Area startup community. After that, she founded Preziosi Consultancy, where she has been helping startups at all stages and in various fields to grow and thrive.
Scientific Advisory Board
Renowned industry experts in regenerative medicine therapies.
Marie Csete, MD, PhD
Scientific Advisor
Dr. Csete brings both stem cell expertise and liver disease expertise to the advisory board. She trained in stem cell biology at Cal Tech and received her MD from Columbia University. Dr. Csete trained in critical care medicine and anesthesiology, focusing on liver transplantation. Following several years on the faculty at Emory University, she served as the first Chief Scientist at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, then as Division Chief for Cell Therapy at the American Association of Blood Banks, V.P. of Research at Organovo, and as the President of the Huntington Medical Research Institute.
Gary Peltz, MD, PhD Technology Inventor + Scientific Advisor
Dr. Peltz is a Professor in the Department of Anesthesia at Stanford University. Previously, he spent 17 years as Head of Genomics at Roche. Dr. Peltz is an expert in the liver disease and the genetics of liver disease. He is the inventor of the SF-Hep Technology being developed by HepaTx.
Shannon Dahl, PhD
Scientific Advisor
Dr. Dahl was a co-founder and VP of Technology at Humacyte, where she led the development of engineered vascular grafts for dialysis patients, worked based on her studies at Duke University. Prior to Duke, Dr. Dahl graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at Humacyte, she led the company's efforts that resulted in award of the first Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation for Humacyte's development candidate. Dr. Dahl currently serves as the CSO Cell Care Therapeutics.
Aras Mattis, MD, PhD
Scientific Advisor
Dr. Mattis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at UCSF. His training includes development of stem cell-derived human hepatocytes for modeling liver diseases.
As a Liver pathologist, he has extensive experience in human liver disease pathophysiology. As a physician-scientist his research interests are focused on regenerative medicine, genome editing, metabolic liver disease, and neoplasia.
Dr. Avnesh S Thakor
Scientific Advisor
Dr Thakor is an adult and pediatric-certified Interventional Radiologist whose vision and research are focused on developing the area of "Precision Delivery" in which targeted delivery approaches are used to locally deliver drug, gene, cell, and cell-free therapies directly to organs using image-guided approaches. As a physician-scientist, Dr Thakor also makes sure that these innovations (i.e. technologies, therapies, and devices) are effectively translated from the benchtop to the beside; to that effect, he is a PI and Co-I on several clinical trials, a successful entrepreneur who has helped found companies, and also serves as an advisor for start-ups as well as established larger biotechnology companies.
Clinical Advisory Board
World-Class Experts in Liver Disease.
Robert Gish, MD
Clinical Advisor
Dr. Robert G Gish, MD, is a fellow of the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease, the American Society of Transplantation and American College of Physicians. He has served on the editorial boards of American Journal of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, Journal of Hepatology, Digestive Diseases and Sciences, and Gastroenterology, among many others. He co-authored a public health policy for liver health in Vietnam focusing on HBV and is also assisting with the development of viral hepatitis health care policies in Georgia, Armenia, and the Philippines. He was a major early contributor to decipher methods for the detection of hepatitis B and C virus and characterizing their epidemiology and clinical presentation in humans. He was involved in studies that led to the genotypic classification strategies and methods now in use worldwide, and has published more than 700 original articles, abstracts, and book chapters.
Mazen Noureddin, MD, MHSc
Clinical Advisor
Mazen Noureddin, MD, MHSc, did his internal medicine residency at the University of Southern California (USC) and then moved to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he enrolled in a three-year hepatology fellowship at the Liver Diseases Branch of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). There, he finished the NIH/Duke University Master of Health Sciences in Clinical Research program. After completing his NIH fellowship, he completed a gastroenterology fellowship at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he was a T32 NIH fellow. He then joined the University of Southern California (USC) as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine in 2013. He was then recruited to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (currently ranked #2 in GI and GI surgery) in 2015 and was appointed as the founding director of Fatty Liver Program.
Mark Thursz, MBBS
Clinical Advisor
Mark Thursz is professor of hepatology in the Division of Digestive Diseases and Head of the Department of Metabolism, Digestion & Reproduction in the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London. Prof Thursz is a clinical hepatologist with inpatient beds and a clinic at St Mary’s Hospital. He was educated at King’s College London and trained in Gastroenterology and Hepatology at St Mary’s being appointed as senior Lecturer and honorary consultant in 1997. His early research work with Howard Thomas and Adrian Hill focussed on genetic susceptibility inviral hepatitis. As an extension of this theme his research expanded to encompass the natural history of viral hepatitis and factors which determine disease progression including the role of the coagulation system in hepatic fibrogenesis. In 2011 Prof Thursz launched the Prevention of Liver Fibrosis and Cancer in Africa (PROLIFCA) programme to address barriers to control and elimination of viral hepatitis in resource limited countries.
Mack Mitchell, MD, MHSc
Clinical Advisor
Dr. Mack C. Mitchell is Vice-President for Medical Affairs and the Nancy and Jeremy Halbreich Professor of Gastroenterology at U.T. Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. He previously served as Chief Medical Officer for Southwestern Health Resources, a clinically integrated physician network, and as the Vice-chair for Clinical Operations in the Department of Internal Medicine at U.T. Southwestern. Dr. Mitchell was the Executive Vice President for the Health System at U.T. Southwestern on an interim basis in 2017-18. Before joining the faculty at UT Southwestern, Dr. Mitchell was Director of Gastroenterology at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore, MD and Chair of Medicine at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, NC. Dr. Mitchell received his B.A. and M.D. from Johns Hopkins University before completing residency in internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and fellowship in gastroenterology and clinical pharmacology at Vanderbilt University and Hospitals. Dr. Mitchell has co-authored numerous research publications and chapters on alcohol-related liver injury and liver diseases including the American Gastroenterology Association guidelines
Julio Gutierrez, MD
Clinical Advisor
Dr. Julio Gutierrez is a Transplant Hepatologist at Scripps Center for Organ and Cell Transplant. He is the Director of the Care Pathway and the Former Director of the Liver Tumor Program at UTHSCA and Medical Director of Liver Transplant at St. Vincent. With broad basic, translational, computational, and clinical research experience in hepaotology, he brings a unique skillset to our team. While at Mount Sinai, Dr. Gutierrez developed methodology to harvest human macrophages from ascites and primary human hepatocytes from explants for cell culture. In his role as faculty attending at UTHSCA, UCSD and Scripps Clinic, Dr. Gutierrez he has conducted federally funded research and pharma sponsored clinical trials to investigate novel therapeutics for hepatitis B & C, fatty liver, T2DM, primary biliary cholangitis, hepatocellular carcinoma, and cirrhosis. Dr. Gutierrez is an industry partner and has worked both on the CRO and sponsor side. He has deep experience as an investigator, and knowledge in the entire cycle of clinical development, including study design, study execution, monitoring, analysis, regulatory interactions, study reporting, and publication.
Dr. Brian Lee, MD MAS
Clinical Advisor
Dr. Brian Lee is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. He is a transplant hepatologist specializing in patient care before and after liver transplant. He completed his medical training at Johns Hopkins and the University of California, San Francisco. His research program is federally funded and focuses on improving health for patients with alcohol use disorder and alcohol liver disease. His research has led to original studies that have impacted the clinical treatment of alcohol-associated liver disease.
