Mystic has assembled a pre-eminent team of Advisors and Consultants to provide strategic guidance, technical expertise and business development.
Dr. David Gorenstein is Deputy Director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine and Distinguished Chair in Molecular Medicine at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston. He also serves as Director of the Gulf Coast Consortium in Magnetic Resonance, a shared facility that includes UTMB, Rice, Baylor College of Medicine, U. Houston, UT HSC Houston and UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. He recently stepped down as Associate Dean for Research, School of Medicine, UTMB and the Charles Marc Pomerat Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Neurosciences & Cell Biology. He previously served as the founding Director of the UTMB Sealy Center for Structural Biology. He has nearly 40 years experience in structural biology, drug design, nucleic acid and protein chemistry with over 240 publications. He currently has a major program in proteomics and nanomedicine for both diagnostics and therapeutics in both infectious diseases and cancer.
Dr. Gorenstein received a bachelors degree in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a masters degree and doctorate in chemistry from Harvard University. Before moving to the Houston/Galveston area, he held faculty positions in the Departments of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Purdue University. He has received a number of awards, including Guggenheim (to UCSF) and senior Fulbright (to Oxford U., England) fellowships and election as Fellow to the AAAS. Dr. Gorenstein holds over 3 dozen patents on novel aptamer technology (awarded and pending), many of which have been licensed to AptaMed and AM Biotechnologies, Galveston and Houston companies he founded.
Michael Fedida has been a director of Watson Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a NYSE generic and branded pharmaceutical company for the past 12 years and recently joined the board of Bradley Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a publicly traded specialty pharmaceutical company. Mr. Fedida is a registered pharmacist and also owns and operates several pharmacies. Mr. Fedida offers hands on experience in OTC, generic and branded pharmaceutical products and has a vast knowledge of the end user market for Mystic’s products.
Dr. Mark Abelson is the Founder and President of Ophthalmic Research Associates, a full-service contract research organization (CRO) providing consulting services for medical device and pharmaceutical development, including pharmaceutical licensing; pre-clinical work; site management services (SMO) with an international network of expert investigators; medical writing; regulatory expertise (including due diligence and FDA submissions); expert advice in development of strategic and tactical business plans; medical device and drug launch planning; data management; statistical analysis; protocol development; and medical communications.
Dr. Abelson is currently a Sr. Clinical Scientist at the Schepens Eye Research Institute and Clinical Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. As well, he is on the Medical Advisory Board of McGill Medical School. Dr. Abelson's clinical and research expertise is in ocular pharmacology, dry eye, allergy and other diseases of the external eye. He has written over 300 publications and abstracts, including his recently published text, Allergic Diseases of the Eye and editor of the Pharmacology Section of Principles and Practice of Ophthalmology.
Dr. Abelson has developed a number of models that are used in the Regulatory approval process in allergy and dry eye, and has played a pivotal role in the approval of more than 17 new drugs for ophthalmology. Approximately 25 years ago he first identified histamine and histamine receptors and the critical role of many inflammatory mediators in the eye. ORA is one of the leading ophthalmic research and consulting groups in the country, with many ophthalmic drug companies as clients. Dr. Abelson has published numerous articles on various drugs and devices in the ophthalmic industry.
Dr. Corinne Lengsfeld is an Associate Professor at the University of Denver. She received her bachelors, masters and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Irvine in 1992, 1993, and 1997 respectively. During this time she specialized in the fundamental behavior of sprays/droplets under extreme conditions and built one of the first micro flow laser induced fluorescence measurement systems. Her postgraduate work was conducted at the University of Colorado at Boulder where she focused her previous spray combustion work on solving problems associated with a spray based single step manufacturing methods for the production of controlled release drug delivery particles. Currently she heads the Biofluids Laboratory conducting research in the forces that hydrodynamic flows impart on particles and material surfaces, particle deposition in mechanical ventilators, correlating~the probability of fragmentation with turbulent length scale,~ manufacturing of non-viral vectors via directed self assembly techniques, simulating the contribution of fluid flow in joint mechanics, and developing remote sensor systems to monitor drug interactions in the aging population. The National Science Foundation, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Keck Foundation fund Dr. Lengsfeld’s research at the University of Denver.