TARA Biosystems Appoints Pharmaceutical Industry Innovation Leader, John M. Baldoni, Ph.D., to Its Board of Directors

NEW YORK, Feb. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- TARA Biosystems, Inc., a company offering physiologically relevant "heart-on-a-chip" tissue models for drug discovery and development applications, announced today that it has appointed pharmaceutical industry innovation leader, John M. Baldoni, Ph.D. to its Board of Directors. 

TARA Biosystems offers bioanalytical testing services on its human stem cell-derived cardiac tissue platform. The company's Biowire™ II platform enables early cardiac risk assessment of drug discovery candidates and accelerates discovery efforts for novel heart medicines via its disease modeling and phenotypic screening capabilities. TARA continues to develop a proprietary analytics platform, leveraging data from internal development programs on its Biowire™ II tissue production platform.  

"TARA Biosystems uniquely enables the production of large amounts of high fidelity human-relevant data," said Dr. Baldoni. "This provides foundational information for machine learning and next-generation computational approaches that are fundamentally shifting the way drug development is done today."

Dr. Baldoni has over 37 years of experience in implementing cutting-edge technology to improving the development of new medicines. He is currently Senior Vice President of In silico Drug Discovery, at GSK, which uses computational methods to identify patient needs, explore molecular interventions to address those needs, and design clinical trials to test the medical hypothesis. The intent is to discover medicines at a higher velocity and with greater precision compared to current approaches. Dr. Baldoni is also a founder and governing board co-chairperson of Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM), which is championing a framework for pioneering applications of deep learning for drug research. ATOM aims to develop computing models that will guide researchers based on a computer's ability to quickly vet millions of molecules for efficacy and structural relationships and that will adapt as they are applied to new data. Dr. Baldoni was previously Senior Vice President, Platform Technology, and Science, at GSK. In that role, he worked across the entire drug discovery and development process.

"TARA's objective is to greatly improve the drug discovery and development process by providing human in vitro models," said Misti Ushio, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of TARA. "Dr. Baldoni brings to TARA a visionary perspective on how engineered human cardiac tissue data can be applied to predictive risk assessment and the acceleration of drug discovery."  

About TARA Biosystems

TARA Biosystems, Inc. provides predictive, in vitro human cardiac tissue models for use in drug discovery and risk assessment. TARA Biosystems offers a high fidelity solution that is based on human iPS cell-derived cardiac tissue matured to physiologically relevant adult-like levels and provides direct measures of cardiac functionality, including contractile force. The TARA platform allows pharma to access human cardiac information on therapeutics candidates earlier in the drug development cycle.

Press Contact: 
Kirsten Thomas
The Ruth Group
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SOURCE TARA Biosystems, Inc.