Christopher Kiritsy
President and Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder

Mr. Kiritsy is a co-founder and President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company and has served as a Director since inception. Mr. Kiritsy is a seasoned entrepreneur, who possesses 20+ years of business and technical experience, previously holding senior management positions in R&D, business development and finance.  At Arisaph, Mr. Kiritsy has evolved the organization from an academic, research orientation to a clinical development enterprise with a rich research pipeline, which led to one of the highest awards from the U.S. government’s Therapeutics Discovery Project Program totaling nearly $3 million with all 12 projects funded. Additionally, Mr. Kiritsy has executed multiple business development transactions, leveraging Arisaph’s strong IP to raise in excess of 70% of its total capital from non-dilutive sources.  

Prior to Arisaph, Mr. Kiritsy served as Executive Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Financial Officer of Kos Pharmaceuticals, Inc., where he played a central role in building the company from start-up to highly profitable, 1,200 person publicly traded enterprise. During his tenure at Kos, Mr. Kiritsy raised approximately $500 million in public equity capital, including Kos’ IPO, and spearheaded in excess of 10 major corporate development transactions. He also played a key operating role in building Kos’ highly successful Niaspan® franchise and in delivering financial results that consistently exceeded Wall Street expectations. In 2005, Fortune Magazine ranked Kos the fastest growing pharmaceutical company in the U.S. and, in 2006, Kos was acquired by Abbott Laboratories for ~$4 billion. 

William Bachovchin, Ph.D.
Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer, Co-Founder

Dr. Bachovchin serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer, and has been a Director since he co-founded the Company in 1999. Dr. Bachovchin is a leader in the areas of boronic acid chemistry and enzyme biochemistry. Dr. Bachovchin's work has led to the discovery of several candidate drugs and to the formation of Point Therapeutics, Inc., which was a publicly traded biotechnology company prior to its merger with DARA BioSciences, Inc. Dr. Bachovchin has published more than 80 peer reviewed journal articles and has been an invited speaker to numerous scientific conferences. Dr. Bachovchin is an inventor on 12 issued patents and on numerous pending patent applications covering a variety of novel drug compounds and methods of treatment.

In addition to his role at Arisaph, Dr. Bachovchin is a Professor of Biochemistry at Tufts University School of Medicine, where he has served as a faculty member for nearly 30 years. Dr. Bachovchin completed his postdoctoral work with J.D. Roberts at the California Institute of Technology and at Harvard Medical School. Prior to his postdoctoral work, Dr. Bachovchin received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and his B.S. from Wake Forest University.

Claude Benedict, MD, Ph.D.
Senior Vice President, Drug Development

Claude Benedict joined Arisaph in July 2008 as Senior Vice President of Drug Development, where he is responsible for preclinical and clinical development of the Company’s products. Dr. Benedict brings in excess of thirty years of research and development experience in both academia and industry, including senior level positions at Viron, Archemix and Aventis, where he served as Global Head of Lead Optimization and Senior Vice President, Preclinical and Early Clinical Development, having global responsibilities for this group at Aventis. Dr. Benedict is an internationally recognized cardiologist and was Professor of Internal Medicine, Division of Cardiology, at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston prior to his tenure at Aventis. He has lectured and conducted seminars at Oxford, John Hopkins and the University of Toronto, and he has co-authored in excess of 100 peer-reviewed publications. Additionally, Dr. Benedict serves as an editorial consultant to several publications focused on cardiology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford and his M.D. from the University of Ceylon.

Robert Baldini
Consultant, Corporate Development

Mr. Baldini joined the Board in 2005 and currently serves as a consultant to Arisaph, assisting in corporate development matters. From 1996 through 2006, Mr. Baldini was Vice Chairman of Kos Pharmaceuticals, Inc. playing key operating roles in sales and marketing and business development. Until 2001, Mr. Baldini was Kos' Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, in which he was responsible for guiding the creation of the Company's sales and marketing departments as well as the product launch of Niaspan® and Advicor®. Prior to Kos, Mr. Baldini served Key Pharmaceuticals from 1982 to 1986 as Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Following its acquisition by Schering-Plough, he continued with the Key Pharmaceuticals Division of Schering-Plough until 1995, last serving as its President.

Mr. Baldini's more than fifty years of pharmaceutical industry experience include senior management positions at Key, Ciba-Geigy and Pfizer. Additionally, he has been involved in the development, launch and management of 27 major products, including several innovative, best-selling drug delivery products, such as Nitro-dur, K-dur, and Imdur in the course of his career. In addition to performing services for Arisaph, Mr. Baldini currently serves as a Board Member for Ferring Pharmaceuticals, KV Pharmaceutical, and Dermworks. Mr. Baldini is currently a member of the Seton Hall University Board of Regents. He holds a B.S. degree from Seton Hall University and an M.B.A. from New York University.

Joseph Suarez
Chief Business Officer and Vice President of Finance

Mr. Suarez joined the company in October 2005 as the Director of Business Planning and Operations. Mr. Suarez has 15 years of pharmaceutical experience with disciplines in the areas of accounting, managed care contract administration, financial analysis, operations, business planning, and business development and licensing. Most recently, Mr. Suarez served as the Director of Financial Analysis and Contracts Administration at Kos Pharmaceuticals, Inc. During his 9 year tenure at Kos, Mr. Suarez played an integral role in corporate development transactions, delivering financial results, appropriate corporate planning, and commercialization of Kos’ cholesterol therapies and acquired assets. Mr. Suarez received his B.S. in Accounting from George Mason University and his M.B.A. from the University of Maryland.

Hung-Sen Lai, Ph.D.
Director of Medicinal Chemistry

Dr. Hung-Sen Lai (Jack) joined the Company in 1999 and currently serves as Director of Medicinal Chemistry. In his current role at Arisaph, Dr. Lai is responsible for chemical synthesis and has been managing a group of scientists working to identify novel drug candidates for diabetes and cancer. By leveraging his proprietary web-based laboratory information tracking system (Calentrack™), Dr. Lai has successfully implemented an aggressive expansion of Arisaph’s compound collection.

Additionally, Dr. Lai is a faculty member at Tufts Medical School, serving as a Research Assistant Professor of the Biochemistry Department. Dr. Lai obtained his Masters Degree in Oncology (Niagara University and Roswell Park Cancer Institute in 1994) and Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1996. His research interests include computer-aided drug design and synthesis of small molecule-based kinase/protease inhibitors. After finishing his postdoctoral training in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School in 1997, he became a founding member of Consensus Pharmaceuticals (Medford, MA), which was established based on his invention of combinatorial cyclic peptide library synthesis and screening techniques. He has published in excess of 20 peer-reviewed papers in journals and book chapters and holds several patents relating to anti-diabetes and anti-cancer therapies.

David Sanford, Ph.D.
Director of Protein Chemistry

Dr. Sanford is acting Director of Protein Chemistry at the Company and has been with Arisaph since 1999. Dr. Sanford also serves as a Research Assistant Professor of the Biochemistry Department at Tufts Medical School. Dr. Sanford's research interests include structural determination of biomolecules by nuclear magnetic resonance and characterization of enzyme kinetics and specificity. He has published in excess of 20 reviewed papers in journals and book chapters. Dr. David Sanford obtained his Bachelors of Science Degree in Pharmacy from Purdue University in 1979 and Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Rochester in 1986. After postdoctoral studies in the Department of Biochemistry at Tufts Medical School, he joined the faculty at Tufts as an Assistant Professor in 1990.