Andre Ghetti, PhD, is CEO of AnaBios. He was formerly the President of AVIVA Biosciences where he led the growth of the company into drug discovery services and intellectual property commercialization.
Prior to joining AVIVA Biosciences, Dr. Ghetti was involved in drug discovery programs at Aurora Biosciences, and later at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Ghetti received his Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Physiology from the University of Verona (Italy) and completed his postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology.
From 1996 to 2001, Dr. Ghetti worked as a staff scientist at the Salk Institute, in La Jolla, California. During the last several years, he has focused on the creation of new tools and strategies to advance biomedical sciences, with special emphasis on enabling the direct study of human biology and pharmacology to accelerate the rate of successful drug discovery and development.
I’m Andre Ghetti, I’m the CEO of AnaBios, I have a background in biochemistry and neurophysiology.
I first started working in academia at the California Institute of Technology and the Salk Institute. I later transitioned to drug discovery, where I had the opportunity to first-hand experience the challenges in advancing molecules from the pre-clinical stage to the clinic.
I discovered how difficult it really is to identify molecules that could cure patients, using animal cells and animal models. This is really what motivated me a few years later to join efforts with our two co-founders and start AnaBios. The company entirely focused on novel, translational methods, that are based on the use of human tissue and cells.
The use of human tissue and cells in research is not a novel idea. What AnaBios is really doing is taking this idea to a completely unprecedented level. We are able to scale the use of human cells in drug discovery thanks to our methodologies for recovery of the donors samples and also for the interrogation methods that we use in the laboratory.
For the first time, we are able to provide high throughput dat with high reliability that are relevant to humans, because they are obtained from human organs, human tissue and human cells isolated and ketp alive in the laboratory.
The ability to keep human organs and tissue alive outside of the human body is something very unique and special to AnaBios. Once you interrupt blood flow, oxygen supply to organs and tissues, these will tend to die very quickly, within minutes. We have developed special techniques and methodologies to maintain all these preparations alive so that we can bring them to the laboratory and ask what type of effects do pharmaceutical compounds have on these organs and tissues.
This can provide extremely predictive data of the potential efficacy and safety of new drugs.
The thing that we’re most proud of at AnaBios is the knowledge that we have already been able to help many of our pharmaceutical clients in advancing successfully new compounds into clinical studies. Also, that we have been able to prevent potentially dangerous and toxic molecules from advancing to clinical studies that could have put patients at risk.
AnaBios joining Neuroservices-Alliance makes a lot of sense. Drug discovery is extremely challenging and complicated, so it is really necessary to combine a variety of approaches and strategies. The uniqueness that AnaBios brings to the Alliance is the abitlity and experience to conduct translational assays in human cells and human tissues.
