en.Wedoany.com Reported - Acurion has expanded its leadership team, board of directors, and advisory team following the recent completion of a $4.3 million oversubscribed seed round. The San Diego-based precision oncology company is dedicated to developing AI-powered cancer biomarker discovery and detection tools. As the company advances its OncoGaze™ platform toward clinical deployment and broader applications, these new appointments aim to enhance its expertise in scientific, clinical, regulatory, and commercial areas.
Newly appointed team members include: Mike Hoerres (M.S.) joins as Chief Commercial Officer Advisor, having previously served as CEO of Cernostics, where he led the development and commercialization of TissueCypher and the company's acquisition by Castle Biosciences; David Schlessinger (Ph.D., MBA) joins as Vice President of Product Development, having held leadership roles at Natera and Exact Sciences, helping drive molecular diagnostics from development to commercialization; Heather Jalisi joins as Vice President of Regulatory Affairs, bringing over 20 years of experience in the diagnostics and medical technology sectors, including tenures at Leica Biosystems, Amalgam Rx, Becton Dickinson, and Naviscan; Leandra Boysen (MBA) joins as Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships, having previously led strategic partnerships and business development initiatives at Syner-G Biopharma, Sequoia Biotech, and Biocom; Rick Schmitt joins as Vice President of Technical Operations, bringing decades of technical leadership experience across healthcare, biotechnology, and enterprise systems, including roles at Biocom, Neurocrine, and Illumina; Mariya Kazachkova (Ph.D.) joins as Senior Machine Learning Scientist, a member of the lab of Ludmil Alexandrov, founding Chief Scientific Officer at the University of California San Diego, having recently completed her doctoral dissertation, and previously served as an Associate Computational Biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Acurion also welcomes the following leaders to its board of directors and strategic advisory board: Irwin Jacobs (M.S., Sc.D.), co-founder, former CEO, and Chairman of Qualcomm, joins as Strategic Science Advisor; Eric Winer (M.D.), Director of the Yale Cancer Center and former President and Chair of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), joins as Strategic Medical Advisor; Tomas Koch (Ph.D.), a public company board member and Chairman of TK Partners, joins the Acurion board following the recent financing, having spent over three decades at McKinsey & Company as a Senior Partner and Senior Advisor to leading global institutions; Ho Sung Cho (Ph.D.), formerly Senior Vice President of Discovery Biotherapeutics at Bristol Myers Squibb, joins as Strategic Science Advisor.
Rick Fultz, CEO of Acurion, stated that these additions reflect the level of expertise required to build clinically meaningful AI tools capable of transforming patient care. Acurion's platform is based on research led by co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Ludmil Alexandrov, whose work in cancer genomics has helped deepen understanding of mutational processes and treatment responses. The company continues to expand clinical collaborations and expects to announce additional partnerships later this year.
Acurion is a San Diego-based precision oncology company developing AI-driven image analysis tools for biomarker detection, extracting clinically actionable insights from routine pathology images. Unlike genomic testing methods that often require additional tissue or specialized molecular assays, its OncoGaze™ platform extracts biomarker information from routine pathology slides prepared in standard clinical care, providing an immediate, scalable, and accessible approach to precision medicine. Despite significant advances in targeted therapies, many cancer patients either lack access to biomarker testing or face life-threatening delays. Acurion aims to expand access to precision oncology by improving biomarker detection and treatment selection across multiple advanced cancer types.
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