SteriCoat Corp is a growing team of seven full time business and science professionals. Click on the featured leadership team to learn more about their professional backgrounds.
David L. Lucchino
Chief Executive Officer
David Lucchino previously co-founded and was Managing Director of LauchCyte, an investment fund that focuses on acquiring and developing biomedical intellectual property from across the United States. LaunchCyte was backed by both the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The firm has six portfolio companies that are built around therapeutics, diagnostics, and tools IP.
David most recently worked at Polaris Venture Partners, a $3 billion venture fund based in Boston as a Senior Associate. He has an M.B.A. from MIT’s Sloan School of Management where he was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, holds an M.S. from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, and a B.A. from Denison University. David is a trustee for Mt. Auburn Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliated teaching facility in Cambridge, MA.
Chris Loose, PhD
Chief Technology Officer
Chris Loose developed SteriCoat’s core technology while earning his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at MIT. He was co-advised by Dr. Bob Langer and Dr. Greg Stephanopoulos. Prior to MIT, Chris worked in Chemical Engineering R&D at Merck Research Labs in New Jersey.
He graduated from Princeton University where he was recognized by the Department of Chemical Engineering as the top undergraduate student and won the School of Engineering’s senior thesis award. Technology Review recently named Chris as one of the "Young Innovators under 35”. Chris was also awarded a Hertz Fellowship, a distinction of being one of the fifteen top graduate students studying in the physical, biological or engineering sciences in the United States.
Scott Rocklage, PhD
Chairman
Dr. Rocklage joined SteriCoat Corp as its Chairman upon closing on its seed investment. He has been a partner at 5AM Ventures since 2003 and became a Managing Partner in 2004. Dr. Rocklage has over 20 years of healthcare management experience with strategic leadership responsibilities that have resulted in the successful approval of three U.S. New Drug Applications by the FDA (Omniscan™, Teslascan® and Cubicin®), and entered six drug candidates into clinical trials.
Dr. Rocklage has served as Chairman & CEO of Cubist Pharmaceuticals, President & CEO of Nycomed Salutar, President, CEO & Chairman of Nycomed Interventional, and has held various R&D positions at Salutar and Catalytica. Dr. Rocklage currently serves as Board Chairman of Achaogen, Ilypsa as well as on the Board of WaveRx, Pulmatrix, Variation and Wildcat and the Board of Associates at the Whitehead Institute. Dr. Rocklage received his BS in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and his PhD in Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Robert Langer, ScD
Co-Founder and Director
Robert S. Langer is one of 13 Institute Professors (the highest honor awarded to a faculty member) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Langer has written nearly 1,000 articles. He also has more than 600 issued or pending patents worldwide, one of which was cited as the outstanding patent in Massachusetts in 1988 and one of 20 outstanding patents in the United States. Dr. Langer's patents have been licensed or sublicensed to over 200 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical device companies; a number of these companies were launched on the basis of these patent licenses. He served as a member of the United States Food and Drug Administration's SCIENCE Board, the FDA's highest advisory board, from 1995-2002 and as its Chairman from 1999-2002.
His work is at the interface of biotechnology and materials science. A major focus is the study and development of polymers to deliver drugs, particularly genetically engineered proteins, DNA and RNAi, continuously at controlled rates for prolonged periods of time. Work is in progress in the following areas:
- Investigating the mechanism of release from polymeric delivery systems with concomitant microstructural analysis and mathematical modeling.
- Studying applications of these systems including the development of effective long-term delivery systems for insulin, anti-cancer drugs, growth factors, gene therapy agents and vaccines.
- Developing controlled release systems that can be magnetically, ultrasonically, or enzymatically triggered to increase release rates.
- Synthesizing new biodegradable polymeric delivery systems which will ultimately be absorbed by the body.
- Creating new approaches for delivering drugs such as proteins and genes across complex barriers in the body such as the blood-brain barrier, the intestine, the lung and the skin.
- Researching new ways to create tissue and organs including creating new polymer systems for tissue engineering.
- Stem cell research including controlling growth and differentiation.
- Creating new biomaterials with shape memory or surface switching properties.
- Angiogenesis inhibition
Dr. Langer has received over 150 major awards. In 2007, he received the 2006 United States National Medal of Science. In 2002, he received the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers and the world.s most prestigious engineering prize, from the National Academy of Engineering. He is the also the only engineer to receive the Gairdner Foundation International Award; 70 recipients of this award have subsequently received a Nobel Prize. Among numerous other awards Langer has received are the Dickson Prize for Science (2002), Heinz Award for Technology, Economy and Employment (2003), the Harvey Prize (2003), the John Fritz Award (2003) (given previously to inventors such as Thomas Edison and Orville Wright), the General Motors Kettering Prize for Cancer Research (2004), the Dan David Prize in Materials Science (2005) and the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research (2005), the largest prize in the U.S. for medical research. In 2006, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 1998, he received the Lemelson-MIT prize, the world's largest prize for invention for being "one of history's most prolific inventors in medicine." In 1989 Dr. Langer was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1992 he was elected to both the National Academy of Engineering and to the National Academy of Sciences. He is one of very few people ever elected to all three United States National Academies and the youngest in history (at age 43) to ever receive this distinction.
Forbes Magazine (1999) and Bio World (1990) have named Langer as one of the 25 most important individuals in biotechnology in the world. Discover Magazine (2002) named him as one of the 20 most important people in this area. Forbes Magazine (2002) selected Langer as one of the 15 innovators world wide who will reinvent our future. Time Magazine and CNN (2001) named Langer as one of the 100 most important people in America and one of the 18 top people in science or medicine in America. Parade Magazine (2004) selected Langer as one of 6 "Heroes whose research may save your life." He has served, at various times, on 15 boards of directors and 30 Scientific Advisory Boards of such companies as Wyeth, Alkermes, Mitsubishi Pharmaceuticals, Warner-Lambert, and Momenta Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Langer has received honorary doctorates from Yale University, the ETH (Switzerland), the Technion (Israel), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), the Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), the University of Liverpool (England), the University of Nottingham (England), Albany Medical College, the Pennsylvania State University, Northwestern University and Uppsala University (Sweden). He received his Bachelor's Degree from Cornell University in 1970 and his Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974, both in Chemical Engineering.
Greg Stephanopoulos, PhD
Co-Founder
Dr. Gregory Stephanopoulos is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. He received his B.S. Degree from the National Technical University of Athens, M.S. Degree from the University of Florida and his Ph.D. Degree from the University of Minnesota, all in Chemical Engineering. He joined, upon finishing his doctorate in 1978, the Chemical Engineering Faculty of the California Institute of Technology, where he served as Assistant and Associate Professor until 1985. In 1985 he was appointed Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT where he has been ever since. He served as Associate Director of the Biotechnology Process Engineering Center between 1990 and 1997 and in 2001 he was appointed Bayer Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. He is also the Taplin Professor of Health Sciences and Technology (2001-), Instructor of Bioengineering at Harvard Medical School (1997-), Member of the International Faculty of the Technical University of Denmark (2001-), and Fellow of the Singapore-MIT Alliance (2000-).
Professor Stephanopoulos' current research focuses on metabolic engineering and its applications to the production of biochemicals and specialty chemicals, the rigorous evaluation of cell physiology using advanced isotopic methods, the metabolism and physiology of mammalian cells with emphasis on obesity and diabetes, and bioinformatics and functional genomics, whereby new genomics-based technologies are applied to the elucidation of cell physiology and metabolic engineering. Professor Stephanopoulos has co-authored or -edited 5 books and published approximately 240 papers and 19 patents. He has supervised 38 graduate and 32 post-doctoral students and is presently the editor-in-chief of the journal Metabolic Engineering and serves on the Editorial Boards of 7 scientific journals. He has been recognized with the Dreyfus Foundation Teacher Scholar Award (1982), Excellence in Teaching Award (1984), Technical Achievement Award of the AIChE (1984), PYI Award (1984), AIChE-FPBE Division Award (1997), M.J. Johnson Award of ACS (2001), and the R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering of the AIChE (2001). In 1992 he chaired the FPBE Division of AIChE and was elected a Founding Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. In 2002 he received the Merck Award in Metabolic Engineering and was elected to the Board of Directors of AIChE. In 2003, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and recently was awarded an honorary doctorate degree (doctor technices honoris causa) by the Technical University of Denmark (2005).
Professor Stephanopoulos has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in the chemical engineering curriculum at Caltech and MIT. He has also developed a number of new classes including Metabolic Engineering, Metabolic and Cell Engineering and, more recently, Bioinformatics. He has co-authored the first textbook on the subject of Metabolic Engineering and participated in the teaching of a number of biotechnology courses in the MIT summer sessions since 1985. He introduced and directed two such courses on the subjects of Metabolic Engineering (1995-99) and Bioinformatics (2000-).
He is presently directing a research group of approximately 20 researchers comprising ~15 graduate students, as well as post-doctoral fellows and visitors.