Elevar Therapeutics Adds Drs. Honghui Zhou and David Lilienfeld as Vice Presidents
SALT LAKE CITY, June 2, 2022 — Elevar Therapeutics, Inc., a fully integrated biopharmaceutical company dedicated to elevating treatment experiences and outcomes for patients who have limited or inadequate therapeutic options, today announced the hiring of Dr. David E. Lilienfeld as vice president of safety and pharmacovigilance and Dr. Honghui Zhou as vice president of pharmacology.
Jennifer Lee, who in 2021 joined Elevar as vice president of clinical operations & data management, was promoted to senior vice president of clinical operations, data management and biostatistics.
“We are fortunate to bring on someone of Dr. Lilienfeld’s stature to lead our drug safety operation, as he’s worked for biotech companies at every stage of development and across myriad therapeutic areas, including oncology,” said Dr. Saeho Chong, chief executive officer of Elevar. “Dr. Zhou’s track record of providing end-to-end clincial pharmacology support for a long list of approved drugs will serve Elevar well as we work toward the commercialization of our products.”
Lilienfeld comes to Elevar from Recursion Pharmaceuticals, where he was senior director of safety, pharmacovigilance and epidemiology. Recursion is a public biotechnology company using machine learning to candidate drug optimization. For more than a decade, he was also a principal at Write for the Pharm, LLC, a biotechnology/pharmaceuticals/medical device consulting company.
Having authored or co-authored more than 100 articles or chapters in books, Lilienfeld is a fellow at the American College of Epidemiology, American Heart Association and International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (for which he was one of the three co-founders in 1985), and has an active medical license in California. He received a Master of Business Administration degree, Master of Science in Engineering (Statistical Computing) degree and Bachelor of Arts (Public Health Opinion) degree from Johns Hopkins University, as well as a Master of Public Health degree in epidemiology from the University of Minnesota and a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Maryland.
Zhou, a seasoned clinical pharmacologist and pharmacometrician, joins Elevar after more than 18 years in increasing leadership roles in clinical pharmacology, pharmacometrics, and pharmacological and translational modeling at Johnson & Johnson (Janssen). As U.S. Head of Pharmacometrics at Janssen since 2018, Zhou oversaw more than 20 pharmacometricians who supported Janssen’s portfolio in several therapeutic areas including Oncology/Hematology, Immunology, and Cardiovascular/Metabolic Diseases.
Zhou is board certified by the American Board of Clinical Pharmacology and has been elected as a Fellow of American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (FAAPS) and Fellow of Clinical Pharmacology (FCP) by American College of Clinical Pharmacology (ACCP). Recently, he received the 2022 Nathaniel T. Kwit Memorial Distinguished Service Award from the ACCP. He earned a Ph.D. in pharmaceutics from the University of Iowa and a B.Pharm in pharmacology from China Pharmaceutical University.
Lee, who joined Elevar in September from Radius Health, Inc., is responsible for providing operational expertise on the strategy, design, execution and interpretation of data from Elevar’s solid tumor late-stage clinical programs. She has more than 25 years of life science experience developing clinical strategies into new products, initiating new drug applications, launching new products, and leading clinical operations from Phase I-IV for small molecules, biologics, and cell and gene therapy for multiple therapeutic areas. Lee accelerated numerous therapeutics, resulting in approvals of seven novel treatments and played a critical role in advancement of product candidates to labeling changes, licensing agreements and market applications.
“Jennifer has already made an immeasurable contribution to Elevar’s clinical development program in the short time she’s been with the company,” said Chong. “We are excited to expand her role in advancing our therapeutics, moving us closer to delivering on our promise of addressing the unmet needs of cancer patients.”
Lee earned a Master of Science in clinical research and regulatory administration from Northwestern University and B.S. in biochemistry from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
About Elevar Therapeutics
Elevar Therapeutics is a rapidly growing, fully integrated biopharmaceutical company built on the promise of elevating treatment experiences and outcomes for patients who have limited or inadequate therapeutic options. Elevar’s lead proprietary drug candidates include rivoceranib (apatinib) and Apealea® (paclitaxel micellar). Rivoceranib is the first small-molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) to be approved in gastric cancer (China, Dec 2014). It has been granted Orphan Drug designation in the U.S., Europe and South Korea and has been clinically tested in over 1,000 patients worldwide in numerous cancer indications. Apealea® (paclitaxel micellar) is a non-Cremophor EL based formulation of paclitaxel that received marketing authorization by the European Commission in November 2018, making it Europe’s first non-Cremophor EL formulation of paclitaxel approved for use in ovarian cancer. Elevar Therapeutics has offices in Utah, California and South Korea, and additional information is available at www.elevartherapeutics.com.
