In Brief
- Scientist, engineer and entrepreneur
- Collaboratively built businesses
- Launched new hi-tech products
- Experience in drug discovery and development and medical device development.
Scientific Background
Shreefal has had a technical research career that has covered the following fields: biomechanics, biomaterials, molecular biophysics, tissue engineering, and ultrasound diagnostic devices. In his last active scientific leadership role, he was a member of the Radiology faculty at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He was part of a team that developed, from concept to clinic, a new ultrasound diagnostic device that assesses the quality of the bone material by nondestructive measurement of its local mechanical properties. The device was used in a clinical trial to assess the efficacy of a new osteoporosis drug. Shreefal has published book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals including Nature Biotechnology, Physics in Medicine and Biology, Biomaterials and others.
Commercialization and Entrepreneurship
The complexities of getting inventions to market propelled Shreefal out of the lab into a specialized MBA program on the management of technological innovation. Concurrently co-founding a cardiovascular drug discovery called Myomatrix Therapeutics, Shreefal launched his business career, raising financing, negotiating partnerships and in-licensing deals with academic institutions and multinational pharma companies. On the merger and acquisition of Myomatrix by Cytopia, a publicly traded Australian company, Shreefal was asked to stay on and lead global business and corporate development activities for the innovative Australian biotech. Shortly therafter, Cytopia launched a collaboration with Novartis to discover and develop a new automimmune drug, leading to Australia's largest (>US$200M) biotech/pharma partnership deal.
He has also led, or participated in, various technological commercialization and economic development activities, including a lead role in the successful market planning and launch of a breakthrough innovation in X-ray analytical technology for the petrochemical industry that is now growing into multi-million dollars in annual sales. He also served for two years as Executive Director of the radical innovation research program at RPI's Lally school of Management and Technology, bringing together a multi-disciplinary academic team with a cohort of business leaders of innovation programs at Intel, HP, P&G, Xerox, Rohm and Haas, Guidant and other market-leading companies. Charged with helping develop technology-based economic planning in the Capital Region, Shreefal organized and led a team of RPI Lally School faculty that was funded to develop technology roadmap reports for the Center for Economic Growth in Albany, NY. These reports can be read here.
Shreefal has continued to give his time for development of young talent, as the originator of a multi-disciplinary course for graduate science, engineering and business students titled 'Commercializing Biomedical Technologies.' He co-organized a workshop for biotech entprepreneurs in the Capital Region. He has also worked on creating a learning forum to help bio-entrepreneurial thinking and development in the upstate NY biotech community through a video-conferenced seminar series (the Biotechnology Management and Entrepreneurship Seminar Series at RPI ) that has been running actively since 2002 and links all the major biotech centers in upstate NY (Cornell, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany/Rensselaer). View archived presentations by webstreaming video links here (Sep06 on). He is also part of the steering committee of BioConnex, the Capital Region Biotechnology Association.
His success and efforts in the NY capital region were recognized with the awarding of the "40 under 40" future business leaders award in 2006.
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