OUR TEAM

Elizabeth Parrish

CEO

Elizabeth Parrish is a humanitarian, entrepreneur, innovator, author, and advocate for genetic cures. As a proponent of progress and education for the advancement of regenerative medicine, she serves as a motivational speaker to the public at large for the life sciences. She is actively involved in international educational media outreach and is a founding member of the International Longevity Alliance (ILA). She is a member of the Life Science Institute of New Jersey, whose mission is to further scientific understanding of the nature and origins of human disease. She was the founder of BioTrove Investments LLC and the BioTrove Podcasts, offering a meaningful way for people to learn about and fund research in regenerative medicine.

George Church

Scientific Advisor

George Church has co-founded more than 14 biotech companies, has authored over 400 papers, and holds 60 patents in his name. Dr. Church is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, a Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute. He is the Principal Investigator of the Center for Genomically Engineered Organs (CGEO), the Harvard/MIT DOE Genomes-to-Life Center, the Lipper Center for Computational Genetics, and is a founding core member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.Dr. Church was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2011) and Engineering (2012), and the Franklin Institute's Bower Award for Achievement in Science (2011). He holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University.

Dr. Tong-Ming Fu

Scientific Advisor

Dr. Tong-Ming Fu is currently the CSO for Infectious Diseases at IGM Biosciences, INC.. He has over 28 years of R&D experience in biotechnology and pharmaceutical settings. He obtained his medical degree at Peking University Health Science Center, formerly Beijing Medical University, in China, and Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University, Hershey Medical Center. He spent over two decades at Merck Research Laboratories, Merck and Co., Inc., where he contributed to many novel vaccine programs, including adenovirus vector HIV-1 vaccines and influenza M2 peptide-conjugate vaccine, and conducted research to understand immune mechanisms of novel adjuvants and immune modulations by PD-1 blocking mAbs. Notably, he initiated and led the research efforts on the novel Merck cytomegalovirus vaccine, which has advanced to Phase 2 for efficacy evaluation. After his tenure at Merck, he served as the head of Sanofi Vaccine Research, North America, and led multiple vaccines and biologics programs including respiratory syncytial virus, influenza virus, SARS-CoV2, and chlamydia, and novel technology platform including mRNA vaccines and human antibodies. He is also an adjunct professor of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and has published extensively on antibodies, vaccines and immune responses.

Bill Andrews

Scientific Advisor

Bill Andrews has been a medical researcher in biotech since 1981, focusing on cancer, heart disease, and inflammation research. His passion has always been aging. In the early-to-mid 1990s, while at Geron Corporation, Bill led the research to discover both the RNA and protein components of telomerase. This enzyme prevents telomeres from shortening in human reproductive cells. It is why our children are born younger than we are even though they come from our old cells. Inducing this enzyme to lengthen telomeres in all our cells, not just our reproductive cells, to reverse aging and declining health due to aging, is the principal goal of Sierra Sciences.

Zhu Hua

Professor

Professor Zhu's laboratory studies two herpesviruses, human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) and Varicella-Zoster virus (VZV). Our goal is to understand HCMV and VZV pathogenesis - specifically, how these viruses interact with host cells, replicate in and cause diseases. HCMV infects approximately 80% of the adult population.HCMV is a major cause of infectious morbidity and mortality in immunocompromised individuals, especially in AIDS and transplant patients. HCMV infection also is a leading cause of birth defects. Since animal models for studying HCMV replication and pathogenesis are not available, severe combined immunodeficient mice implanted with human tissue provide an alternative model for these studies. HCMV clinical isolates replicate to high titers in implanted human tissue; however, attenuated strains have completely lost this ability. The major difference between clinical and attenuated strains is a 15-kb segment encoding 19 viral genes that is present in all virulent strains but absent in attenuated strains. We plan to map the important genes in this region and study their function in viral replication and pathogenesis. VZV causes chickenpox and shingles. It has a 125-kb genome and encodes 70 unique open reading frames (ORFs). The functions of many its ORFs are not clear. The generation of recombinant VZV has been hindered by its highly cell-associated nature in cultured cells and its poor infectivity of purified VZV DNA. A major advance in VZV genetics was the cloning of the genome as four overlapping segments into cosmids, which significantly improved isolation of mutant strains. However, cosmid systems are difficult to master and making mutants is laborious. For this reason, knowledge about the function of many VZV proteins and their role in pathogenesis lags behind many other herpesviruses. To make these studies more efficient, we have recently cloned a complete VZV genome as a bacterial artificial chromosome. This allows us to stably manipulate and propagate VZV genomic DNA in E. coli. Furthermore, we can efficiently generate recombinant VZV for studies of VZV gene function in different systems.

Dr. Jason R. Williams

Medical doctor, researcher and professor

Jason R. Williams is a medical doctor, board-certified radiologist, image-guided cancer specialist, researcher, and professor. He is one of the pioneers of immunotherapy, specializing in intra-tumoral interventions. He performed the world's first ablation procedure and implemented an intra-tumoral injection of a specific combination of immunotherapy agents, thus leveraging the actual process of ablation as an immunotherapy agent itself. Since then, he has performed thousands of procedures many of them “first in human” in multiple areas of ablation and cryoablation therapies. Dr. Williams is the Director of Interventional Oncology and Immunotherapy at the Williams Cancer Institute, where he has been advancing the use of intra-tumoral immunotherapy. He is also an adjunct professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he is helping to further cutting-edge research. In addition, he is actively involved in private research combining numerous different immunotherapy agents for image-guided intra-tumoral injection covering almost all cancer types. He and his wife, Stefanya Williams live between Fort Lauderdale and Mexico City. To learn more about Dr. Williams and his clinic, visit www.WilliamsCancerInstitute.com. Dr Williams started doing ablation in the early 2000s in his university. Then the need of creating an institute started to become more evident, but the process was not easy. Williams Cancer Institute started in a difficult time because there was lack of approval, lack of insurance coverage and the hospitals were not receptive. In 2014, we started doing procedures mainly in the US. Our facilities were in florida, atlanta and lately in Southern California where we then decided to move to Mexico and eventually, to mexico City. Williams Cancer Institute was called Image Guided Cancer Specialist at that moment. It was at the same time when Dr. Williams was writing our book The Immunotherapy Revolution. It ultimately changed to Williams Cancer Institute and now we have 3 facilities in between Mexico and the US, having the best team ready to save cancer patients' lives. We´re also looking to keep growing and we hope to get more facilities around the world, someday we want to achieve the dream of Dr. Williams to see cancer become a distant memory from the past.

Dr. Aubrey de Gray

Scientfic Advisor

Aubrey received his BA in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000, respectively. He is the author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999), Ending Aging (2007), and a large number of academic papers. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the advisory boards of numerous scientific journals and research organizations. He is a prolific speaker who regularly presents at conferences and events world-wide.

John Schloendorn

Scientific Advisor

CEO John Schloendorn PhD, 39. John founded Gene And Cell Technologies in 2013 and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Prior to founding Gene And Cell Technologies, John was the CEO of ImmunePath, a venture-backed regenerative medicine startup. At ImmunePath, John oversaw the development of immune cell therapies from embryonic stem cells from 2009 to 2012. John served as the Director of SENS Foundation's intramural Research Center from 2006 to 2009, where he led a variety of anti-aging programs through the pre-clinical stages. A native of Germany, John holds a Green Card under the National Interest Waiver, a program designed to retain technology leaders considered of national interest to the USA.

Matthew Scholz

Business Advisor

Matthew co-founded Oisín Biotechnologies. He serves as Oisín's Chief Executive Officer and its oncology-focused spin-out OncoSenX, two biotech firms commercializing a breakthrough platform technology for killing unwanted cells based on their genetics. Matthew speaks and presents regularly to scientific, association and academic audiences, including those at his alma mater, the University of Washington. He served for several years as a mentor to recipients of the Thiel Fellowship, a program that awarded grants to some of the world's brightest scientific minds under age 20.