TARA Biosystems' CEO Misti Ushio Named to Fast Company's Top 100 Most Creative People in Business

NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- TARA Biosystems Inc., a company offering physiologically relevant, human "heart-on-a-chip" tissue-models for drug discovery and development applications, is proud to announce that TARA CEO Dr. Misti Ushio has been recognized by Fast Company as one of the Top 100 Most Creative People in Business today. The annual list honors an influential and inspiring group of leaders from a wide range of industries who are shaping the future of business in creative ways.

Dr. Ushio is the founding CEO of TARA Biosystems, a fast-rising star in the emerging organ-on-a-chip industry, which is disrupting the lengthy, expensive and error-prone processes that plague conventional biopharmaceutical drug discovery and development. Today, decisions regarding safety of biopharmaceutical drug candidates remain reliant on the use of animal models that are poor proxies for human biology, potentially leading to costly failures discovered years later after hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and, in some cases, adverse human health outcomes. TARA is poised to transform this paradigm by offering a less costly, faster and more effective way to predict human response to drug candidates using engineered human heart tissue that mimics the function of human heart tissue as nature designed it.

"I am deeply honored to be named to Fast Company's Top 100 Most Creative People in Business," said Dr. Ushio. "I founded TARA with the vision of addressing a big, global issue that affects every one of us: accelerating the pace of developing new medicines that will enable us to live healthier, more productive, longer lives. Each of us, personally, as a family member or member of society knows what it's like to have someone that we care about suffer from ill health or disease. At TARA, delivering on the promise of safer, more effective drugs, sooner, is everything I've trained for as a scientist, entrepreneur and mom – it's personal and professional – it's what I strive to do every single day, with purpose and integrity."   

Dr. Ushio has over 20 years of experience in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry and early-stage life science company-building. Previously she was chief strategy officer and managing director of Harris & Harris Group, where she worked with, and invested in, life science companies to help them realize their transformational science into commercially successful companies. Earlier in her career, Dr. Ushio held management roles at Merck & Company, where she developed vaccines and biologics products, and Columbia University, where she managed the intellectual property of several scientific and engineering portfolios. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University (B.S., chemical engineering), Lehigh University (M.S., chemical engineering) and University College London (Ph.D., biochemical engineering). She also serves as a director on the boards of private and public life science companies.

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 iPSC-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 therapeutic candidates earlier in the drug development cycle.

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SOURCE TARA Biosystems Inc.