management
Manish Singh, Ph.D., MBA, President and Chief Executive Officer
Prior to joining ImmunoCellular Therapeutics, Dr. Singh was a Director of California Technology Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm in Pasadena, California, from June 2003 to December 2007. During his tenure at California Technology Ventures, Dr. Singh co-lead investments by that firm in several life sciences companies, including Aliva Biopharmaceuticals, SurgRx, Vivant Medical, Angioscore and Ceregene. He also acted as the interim CEO of Aliva Biopharmaceuticals, a human monoclonal antibody production company focused on creating a greater diversity of antibodies, and was a board member or observer for several companies, including Aliva, Angioscore and Ceregene.
Before joining California Technology Ventures, Dr. Singh spent 14 years in various scientific and managerial positions in research, product development, manufacturing, and business development at Genetic Therapy, Inc. (acquired by Novartis Pharmaceuticals), Chiron Corporation, and Cell Genesys, where he was responsible for the process development, scale-up, technology transfer, and manufacturing of several gene therapy products. During this time he worked on a number of preclinical and clinical programs in oncology and hemophilia.
Dr. Singh holds ten issued patents and patent applications, and has been an invited speaker at several national and international conferences on gene therapy, cell therapy and drug delivery. Dr. Singh received his BS in Chemical Engineering from IIT (Roorkee, India), MS in Chemical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and his Ph.D. in Biochemical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and did his post-doctoral work at the American Red Cross in Biomedical Sciences. He also received his MBA at the Anderson School at UCLA, where he was a Deutschman Venture Fellow and a Patrick J. Welsh Entrepreneurship Fellow.
John S. Yu, M.D., Chief Scientific Officer and Chairman of the Board
Dr. Yu is a member of the full-time faculty in the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. An internationally renowned neurosurgeon, Dr. Yu's clinical focus is on the treatment of malignant and benign brain and spinal tumors. He is also conducting extensive research in immune and gene therapy for brain tumors. He has also done extensive research in the use of neural stem cells as delivery vehicles for brain cancers and neurodegenerative diseases.
He was inducted into Castle and Connelly's America's Top Doctors in 2005. Dr. Yu has published articles in a number of prestigious journals, including The Lancet, Cancer Research, Cancer Gene Therapy, Human Gene Therapy, Journal of Neuroimmunology, Journal of Neurological Science and Journal of Neurosurgery.
Dr. Yu earned his bachelor's degree in French literature and biological sciences from Stanford University and spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris studying French literature. He also pursued a fellowship in immunology at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. He earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and master's degree from the Harvard University's Department of Genetics. He completed his neurosurgical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In addition, he was a Neuroscience Fellow at the National Institutes of Mental Health in the Neuroimmunology Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1988 to 1989 and was a Culpepper Scholar at the Molecular Neurogenetics Unit at that hospital from 1993 to 1995. Dr. Yu's other honors include the Preuss Award, Joint Section on Tumors, American Association of Neurological Surgeons and Congress of Neurologic Surgeons in 1995. He received the Academy Award from the American Academy of Neurological Surgery at its 1996 annual meeting. Other honors include the Young Investigator Award from the Congress of Neurological Surgeons in 2000, the National Brain Tumor Foundation Grant in 2001, and the Mahaley Clinical Research award from the American Association of Neurological Surgeons in 2005.
David Fractor, Chief Financial Officer
Mr. Fractor has served as our Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer on a part-time basis since April 2011. Since 2003, Mr. Fractor has been a consultant providing financial consulting and strategic planning services, including Sarbanes-Oxley compliance consulting services, to a variety of companies in a variety of industries. From 1999 through 2003, Mr. Fractor was the Chief Financial Officer of HemaCare Corporation, a publicly traded corporation which collects, manufactures, tests and distributes blood products to hospitals and provides blood services to patients in hospital settings on an outsourcing basis. Previously, Mr. Fractor was in public practice of accounting where he was an audit manager at Deloitte and also served in a similar capacity in a regional accounting firm. Mr. Fractor received his B.S. in Accounting from the University of Southern California in 1982 and is a certified public accountant and a member of AICPA and the California Society of CPA's.
James G. Bender, Ph.D., M.P.H., Vice President, Clinical Development
Dr. Bender, who joined IMUC in 2008, brings more than 20 years of clinical development experience to the company. He joined the company from IDM Pharma, where he was from 2002 through 2008, serving most recently as director of product development where he led the efforts relating to the clinical development of a cancer vaccine, IDM-2101, for lung cancer. Prior to that, he was at Nexell Therapeutics where he held various positions relating to the development of therapeutic stem cell and cancer vaccine products. Prior to that, Dr. Bender spent 10 years with Baxter Healthcare Corporation, eight years with the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and five years with St. Joseph's Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has over 75 scientific publications, is an inventor on 11 U.S. patents and holds a Ph.D. degree in immunology from the University of New Mexico and an M.P.H. in laboratory management from the University of Michigan.