Bruce S. Morra, Ph.D., MBA was appointed to the Board on December 7, 2005 by the Board of Directors and was elected by the Shareholders on March 14, 2006. Dr. Morra earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Polymer Science and Engineering and his M.B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1980, after graduating magna cum laude in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University in 1976. He has more than 24 years of pharmaceutical, medical device, drug delivery, biotech and polymers industry leadership experience, and is now a consultant and Board member to various companies in these fields. From April 2003 through the end of 2004, Dr. Morra was President of West Pharmaceutical Services' Drug Delivery and Contract Clinical Research businesses. After turning around the businesses via strategies that refocused on the company's core expertise, driving three new products into phase II clinical trials, submitting the first formulation for regulatory approval and consummating 10 new development/licensing deals, Dr. Morra orchestrated the sale of the Drug Delivery business to a leading venture capital group, Warburg Pincus. Prior to joining West, for the period 2000 to 2003, he was Chief Business Officer for Progenitor Cell Therapy, LLC, a start-up company performing cell-based process, device and drug development; President, COO and CFO of Biopore Corporation and its sister company Polygenetics, Inc., driving development of applications for their unique porous polymer microsphere technology in fields that included drug delivery, embolotherapy, gene therapy and bioartificial livers; while also being a Board Member and consultant for other life science companies. From 1993 to 2000 Dr. Morra served as President, COO and Founder of Flamel Technologies, Inc., a drug delivery systems and biomaterials company. Dr. Morra assisted in raising venture capital funding for Flamel and taking the company public on the Nasdaq in 1996. Before he started Flamel's US subsidiary, Dr. Morra served as the President of ISP Filters, Inc., a subsidiary of GAF Corp and held positions in General Management, New Business Development, Product Management, Marketing, Finance and R&D at Ausimont USA, Amoco Performance Products and E.I. DuPont.
|