Nele Van Dessel, Ph. D.
Co-founder and CEO
Dr. Nele Van Dessel was a post-doctoral researcher in the Forbes lab at UMass Amherst and developed the bacterial delivery platform. She received her Master’s degree in bioengineering and her Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from KULeuven in Leuven, Belgium.
Vishnu Raman, Ph.D.
Co-founder and CSO
Dr. Raman has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and is a former graduate student of Dr. Forbes. He is the co-inventor of the genetic modifications for the second and third-generation vector.
Neil Forbes, Ph.D.
Co-founder and Scientific Advisor
Dr. Neil Forbes has been a professor of Chemical Engineering at UMass Amherst since 2003. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. For more than twenty years Dr. Forbes’ primary research focus has been determining and controlling the mechanisms of bacterial tumor targeting, and he is one of the world leaders in this field. His research discovered unique properties that enable therapeutic bacteria to target tumors by penetrating the tissue and thereby providing targeted drug delivery directly to a malignant tumor.
John Ketchum, MBA
Business Advisor
John Ketchum has over 30 years of experience in the biomedical space, including 28 years working for large pharmaceutical companies (GSK and Novartis), mostly in oncology. This has included pre-launch commercialization, clinical development, product launch and marketing, and general management on six continents.