TessArae, LLC taps L. Thomas Richards, M.D. as President

POTOMAC FALLS, Va., June 8, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- TessArae®, LLC, a privately held company, today announced that it has appointed Tom Richards as its new President.  Dr. Richards has held faculty positions at Stanford University Medical Center and UCSF Medical Center, where he currently practices as an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine.  Richards is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and Yale College.  Prior to attending medical school, Dr. Richards was an investment banker in the mergers & acquisitions departments of several firms, including Lazard Freres, UBS Securities and SGCowen.  He has transactional experience in a wide variety of industries and products, including capital raising, leveraged buyouts and public mergers. From 2006 until 2010, he served on the Board of Directors of Cowen Group, a publicly-traded healthcare and technology investment bank where he was a member of the Audit and Corporate Governance Committees.

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"I am excited to be joining the team at TessArae," says Dr. Richards.  "TessArae's technology makes it one of the most exciting molecular diagnostic companies today.  In a single assay, it simultaneously detects and identifies hundreds of pathogens, confronting some of the most confounding problems in healthcare: nosocomial infections, antibiotic resistance, blood safety, food safety and pharmaceutical manufacturing quality assurance.  That same technology allows it to analyze hundreds of human genetic mutations in a single assay, providing researchers and clinicians alike the chance to help patients understand their own genetic risks and inform their reproductive decisions.  TessArae is positioned at an inflection point of very rapid growth."

Klaus Schafer, CEO of TessArae adds, "Tom brings a unique combination of skills to TessArae:  he is a practicing academic physician with an investment banking background, public board experience and a deep grounding in Wall Street transactional finance. His medical and financial acumen will be a great contribution to our team and to our rapidly expanding customer base, which now includes the US, Canada, Mexico, China and the Middle East."

All TessArae assays are currently research use only applications and not intended for in vitro diagnostic use.

About TessArae, LLC

TessArae, founded in 2005, is a next generation diagnostics and bioinformatics company that designs and develops microarray-based targeted resequencing applications in the fields of infectious disease detection and identification, pharmaceutical manufacturing QA/QC, tools for genetic testing and services for research and clinical diagnostics, by leveraging the molecular genomics, infectious disease, medical, and public health experience of its founders.  

The TessArray® (Resequencing Microarray) technology is a turnkey solution for the identification of 50,000 to 300,000 base pairs of genomic sequence in any combination from clinical and environmental samples, enabling characterization of multiple co-infecting pathogens, multiple genes or mutations, and elucidation of novel sequence variants, all in a same day, single sample, multiple result test.

TessArae was the only sequencing-based company to receive an EUA from the FDA for detection of the 2009 H1N1 Influenza A virus, making the TessArray RM-Flu assay the first microarray-based test that directly generated genomic sequence from multiple influenza virus genes to identify and distinguish the H1N1 influenza virus strain from the seasonal A/H1N1 or A/H3N2 viruses, all in a single test.  TessArae was also highlighted at the recent American College of Medical Genetics meeting, March 2011, in Vancouver as being the creator of the an Ashkenazy Jewish, rare inherited mutation panel, which provided significantly improved results at a much lower cost than previous methods.  

TessArae, a privately held company, is headquartered in Potomac Falls, VA.  For more information about TessArae, please visit the company's website at www.tessarae.com or by e-mail at [email protected].

NOTE: TessArae®, TessArae & Vertical Mosaic Design®, TessArray®, and TessArray & Horizontal Mosaic Design®, and Move Beyond PCR(SM) are registered trademarks and service marks owned by TessArae, LLC.

Forward Looking Statements

All statements in this press release that are not historical are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act as amended, including statements regarding TessArae LLC's' "expectations," "beliefs," "hopes," "intentions," "strategies" or the like. Such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially for TessArae from those projected.  

SOURCE TessArae, LLC