About Vulcan Biosciences
Vulcan Biosciences, Inc.’s mission is to commercialize a therapy for treating multiple sclerosis (MS), a debilitating disease of the central nervous system. According to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, one million people in the US and more than two million people globally are afflicted with MS. Using Vulcan Biosciences mass spectrometry platform for drug discovery, the company has discovered two patent-pending lead drug candidates with a strong efficacy signal that suppresses paralysis in the preclinical mouse model of MS, and have novel mechanisms-of-action compared to pre-existing treatments.
The company is headquartered in Birmingham Alabama and has the appropriate personnel to develop its MS drugs optimally for FDA trials and obtain the financing required to complete this process. The key individuals in the company working on these objectives are described below.
MEET THE TEAM
Omar Flores
President & CEO
Omar has extensive experience in venture capital and previously served as a senior analyst at Mountain Group Capital in Nashville Tennessee and Chief Investment Officer for Alumshares in Raleigh North Carolina. He was Vice President of Clinical Operations and Finance at NuSirt Biopharma where he coordinated all the necessary preclinical ADME and toxicology studies to support FDA IND filings for an entire pipeline of investigational drugs and oversaw the execution of three Phase II clinical trials. He served as a consultant and acting COO/CFO at Phoenix FCR Biosciences where he led late preclinical and Phase I studies in oncology. Omar received his Ph.D. in Molecular Pharmacology from the University of Miami and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University as a Hoffman La-Roche fellow. Concurrent with his postdoctoral fellowship he completed an MBA from the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler business school with a concentration in finance.
Michael Heaven
CSO
Mike earned a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Alabama at Birmingham studying the composition of protein aggregates that form in the rare neurological disorder, Alexander disease. He is the inventor of US patent 8,658,355 and has published 7 peer-reviewed articles with collaborators including the FDA, Janssen, Vanderbilt University, University of Cincinnati, University of California-Davis, Columbia University, Virginia Tech, and other institutions. Mike has 15 years of research experience and a diverse set of skills including drug discovery and development in the animal models of multiple sclerosis, recombinant protein synthesis and purification methods, cell culture, protein-protein interaction analysis, and bioinformatics approaches for whole cell/tissue mass spectrometry-based proteomics.
Archie Cobbs
COO
Archie is an experienced entrepreneur and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He subsequently worked for IBM and other companies in Silicon Valley before returning to Birmingham to play key technical leadership roles at various startups including Awarix, Definicare, Emergency Callworks, VeriPhase, PatientEXP, Guideway Care and others. Archie has written and maintains all of the highly complex proteomic software tools developed by Vulcan Biosciences.