Board of Directors

Ernest Mario, Ph.D.

Dr. Mario currently serves as Chairman of Capnia and Chimerix, and is a Venture Partner with Pappas Ventures, a life science venture capital firm. In addition to his current and past service on several corporate boards, Dr. Mario is active in numerous educational and healthcare organizations. He is Chairman of the American Foundation for Pharmaceutical Education, a Director of the Gladstone Foundation, and past Chairman of the Duke University Health System. Dr. Mario served in management at a number of drug companies before being named in 1989 Chief Executive of Glaxo. During his tenure, Glaxo brought five major new products to market and saw sales and profits increase by 15% annually. Later Dr. Mario led drug delivery technology company Alza until selling it to Johnson & Johnson in 2001. He subsequently served as Chairman and CEO of Reliant Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Mario holds honorary doctorates from the University of Rhode Island and Rutgers University, the latter of which in 2001 renamed its pharmacy school the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy. In 2007 he was awarded the Remington Medal by the American Pharmacists’ Association, pharmacy’s highest honor.

Dr. Mario received his B.S. in pharmacy from Rutgers University, and M.S. and Ph.D. in physical sciences from the University of Rhode Island.

Gregory G. Mario, M.B.A – President and CEO

Mr. Mario joins TAXIS with more than 20 years of experience in the life sciences industry as a sales, marketing, business development, and licensing and acquisition professional. Prior to his role at TAXIS, he served as the Senior VP of Business Development with Talk America, a local-long distance telecommunications provider, and remains Partner at MFP, LP, a private equity investment entity focused on the life sciences sector. Mr. Mario co-founded the Brownstone Advisory Group, a real estate investment fund, and is a Director at Evogen, Inc., a development stage laboratory diagnostics company focused on central nervous system disease management.

Mr. Mario received a B.S. in Biochemistry from Trinity College. He earned an M.B.A. in Finance and Marketing at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University as a Fuqua Scholar.

Chris M. Cimarusti, Ph.D

Dr. Cimarusti has broad experience in pharmaceutical discovery, development and manufacturing. He served as Vice President of Process R&D at the Pharmaceutical Research Institute and as SVP of Pharmaceutical Development. Dr. Cimarusti held executive leadership
positions at Squibb Corporation and Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) in discovery and development, where he co-led the antibiotic effort and served as Director of Organic Chemistry for the Squibb Institute for Medical Research. He published more than 40 papers, and was inventor or co- inventor on more than 60 patents in the areas of cardiovascular, steroid, and b-lactam research, including both compound and process patents.

Dr. Cimarusti earned a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Purdue University and completed Postdoctoral Research at Columbia University.

S. David Kimball, Ph.D.

Dr. David Kimball joins TAXIS with more than 30 years of experience in the discovery and development of small molecule drug candidates. He currently serves as Associate Vice President for the Office of Research Commercialization (ORC) at Rutgers University. Dr. Kimball is also a Research Professor at the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy.

Previously, Dr. Kimball was Chief Scientific Officer at Hydra Biosciences, a biopharmaceutical company focused on applying its understanding of Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) ion channels to the discovery of drugs for pain, inflammation and respiratory disease. He also served as Senior Vice President of Nonclinical Research at Pharmacopeia, Inc.

Dr. Kimball served as Vice President of Chemistry at Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, where he was responsible for building an organization of over 75 chemists, including medicinal, analytical, computational, process research and development, library synthesis and outsourcing chemistry. He spent the first 19 years of his career at Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute, most recently as Research Fellow in the Division of Medicinal Chemistry, Princeton, NJ.

Dr. Kimball earned his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry/Chemical Biology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Stephen M. Dunn

Mr. Dunn is currently President and Senior Managing Director of Healthcare at LifeTech Capital, a life sciences business development firm. Previously, he was Senior Managing Director of LifeTech Capital Healthcare Investment Banking at Aegis Capital and Newbridge Securities. Prior to those positions, Mr. Dunn was Senior Managing Director of LifeTech Capital Research at Newbridge Securities, Aurora Capital and Jesup & Lamont, as well as Director of Research at Dawson James Securities. Mr. Dunn was a top ranked 5-star biotechnology analyst on Thomson Reuters StarMine and he previously held Series 7, 63, 24, 86, 87 and 79 securities licenses. Mr. Dunn is an accomplished speaker and moderator at both financial and scientific conferences and has appeared in financial publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s the Washington Post and the Financial Times and in scientific publications such as Nature and The Scientist as well as on television for the Nightly Business Report and Bloomberg.

Prior to Mr. Dunn’s career on Wall Street, he worked at several public and private global biomedical companies working in over 25 countries in North America, Europe and the Far East. He has held management positions in Business Development, Finance and Operations, most recently in business development at Coulter Corporation and Beckman Coulter (acquired by Danaher). He previously held various management positions at Telectronics (acquired by St. Jude Medical and now Abbott Laboratories), Cordis Corporation (acquired by Johnson & Johnson and now Cardinal Health) as well as several smaller companies within the biomedical industry. He has negotiated numerous intellectual property licenses as well as product development, venture funding, M&A and joint venture agreements.