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Our Mission

Clara Biotech’s mission is to enable tomorrow’s medical breakthroughs in exosomes today by solving the critical issues of purification and isolation. Removing these two roadblocks will open the door for diagnostic and therapeutic advances ranging from

 

Therapeutics applications like:

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  • Personalized medicine

  • Targeted drug delivery

  • Immunotherapy

  • Orphan & Rare Diseases

 

Liquid Biopsy Diagnostics and

Biomarker Discovery like:

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  • Early cancer detection

  • Alzheimer’s Disease

  • Virus detection

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With the goal of making these possibilities a reality, Clara Biotech was founded in 2018. The team is dedicating its 50+ years of combined experience to addressing the critical manufacturing challenges keeping exosome solutions from reaching the patients who need them most.

 

Despite exosomes being discovered less than ten years ago, in the last year more than 20% of all research in the field has been developed. However, every exosome researcher runs into the same problem: lack of standardization around a simple, reliable isolation method.

 

Just as the exosome industry is expanding, Clara Biotech is expanding its services to provide an in-lab isolation kit. Interested labs can apply for early access and become one of the first to bring this groundbreaking technology in-house.

 

So, how does it work? Let us explain.

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Chief Executive Officer

Jim West has been actively working on medical device product and company development since earning his MS in biomedical product development from KU (2011), and a Masters Certificate in Entrepreneurship from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (2009) thanks to a grant from the Kauffman Foundation. He has worked in all areas of medical product development.

Our Team

Founded by Dr. Mei He and Mr. James West in April 2018, the technology that forms the basis for Clara Biotech comes from Dr. Mei He’s research lab which was started in 2012.

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Learn more about the team in charge of it all.

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Chief Science Office

Dr. Mei He is a professor at the University of Florida. She received her PhD from the University of Alberta and postdoctoral training from UC Berkeley. Since 2015 she has served as a principal investigator and been leading a career in translational medicine involving cutting-edge microfluidic technology, 3D bioprinting, nano-biomaterials, and exosomes. In February 2019 she was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering (www.nature.com/articles/s41551-019-0356-9) detecting ovarian cancer through exosomal markers.

Chief Development Officer

Thomas Krol PharmD has a passion to bring new technologies to people who need them. He has worked in large pharma companies like Pfizer and Sanofi in both R&D and commercial roles and in start-ups. Tom also worked as Managing Director of the KBA. He has a B.S. in pharmacy from Ferris State University and PharmD from the University of Utah. He completed a residency at the University of Utah and a fellowship in drug development at the University of North Carolina.