Founders

Gregory G. Mario, M.B.A – President and CEO

Mr. Mario joins TAXIS with more than 20 years of experience in the life sciences industry as a sales, marketing, business development, and licensing and acquisition professional. Prior to his role at TAXIS, he served as the Senior VP of Business Development with Talk America, a local-long distance telecommunications provider, and remains Partner at MFP, LP, a private equity investment entity focused on the life sciences sector. Mr. Mario co-founded the Brownstone Advisory Group, a real estate investment fund, and is a Director at Evogen, Inc., a development stage laboratory diagnostics company focused on central nervous system disease management.

Mr. Mario received a B.S. in Biochemistry from Trinity College. He earned an M.B.A. in Finance and Marketing at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University as a Fuqua Scholar.

Edmond J. LaVoie, Ph.D.

Dr. LaVoie is Professor and Chair of Medicinal Chemistry at the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy at Rutgers University. He founded TAXIS in 2009, following more than 30 years of experience, during which he invented 30 issued, 27 filed and eight provisional U.S. patents and authored 220 peer-reviewed scientific publications. Prior to TAXIS, Dr. LaVoie co-founded Prodaptics Pharmaceuticals, Inc., where he addressed an early stage antiviral drug discovery concern targeting influenza viral polymerase. His many accomplishments as a synthetic organic chemist have attained him international recognition as a leader in the advancement of drug design and discovery. Dr. LaVoie has earned both an NIH MERIT Award and a Johnson and Johnson Discovery Fellowship Award. Additionally, he held the role of Associate Editor of Letters in Drug Design and Discovery and has been a member of several scientific review panels, including the NIH, NIEHS, DOE, EPA, American Cancer Society, and the American Institute for Cancer Research.

Dr. LaVoie received a B.S. in Chemistry from Fordham University. He earned a Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry at SUNY Buffalo.

Daniel S. Pilch, Ph.D.

Dr. Pilch is an Associate Professor of Pharmacology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, with a joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers. He has established himself as a leading expert in drug design, action, targeting and pharmacology. Dr. Pilch is credited with inventing five patents and authoring more than 75 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He has served on several scientific review panels for the NIH, American Cancer Society, American Chemical Society, and the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation. He received a New Investigator Award from the Cancer Institute of New Jersey and has served as a scientific consultant to the pharmaceutical industry in connection with the application of calorimetric techniques for drug screening and identification. Currently, Dr. Pilch serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Perspectives in Medicinal Chemistry, and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Drug Design, Development and Therapy.

Dr. Pilch received a B.A. degree in Zoology from the University of California at Berkeley, and earned a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of California at San Francisco.