About Us New - SageMedic

Message From Our Founder

I am a California licensed physician, known for my track record in clinical research that has changed perioperative clinical care for patients. However, my sense of accomplishment faded when cancer struck home. First, my mother lost her painful fight to ovarian cancer. And seeing this, my father declined anti-cancer therapy, when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Only then, I realized that – despite of significant advances in genomic testing – for most cancer patients the most effective treatment is still unknown.

Thus, to find better ways to predict the most effective therapy for a patient, I left the clinical department at UCSF, got an MBA from Wharton, became a life-science impact investor, and started SageMedic. Thanks to the support of many investors and a great team, we’re ready to pursue clinical calibration and validation studies and collaborate with other companies to develop new drugs for cancer patients.

If making a huge difference intrigues you, please reach out to join us as an impact investor, collaborator, scientist, advisor, consultant, or patient advocate, or just to learn more.

Management

Chris Apfel, MD, PhD, MBA

Founder, CEO, & Chairman of the Board

California-licensed physician, clinical researcher with 100+ publications including NEJM, impact investor, board member and advisor to over a dozen of life science startups. MD/PhD from the University of Giessen, Germany, and MBA from Wharton, U Penn.

Brigitte Apfel, MD

Co-Founder and Treasurer

Pulmonologist with significant experience in the treatment of lung cancer, UCSF-trained psychiatrist in private practice.  MD from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, Germany.

John Fruehauf, MD, PhD

Acting Chief Medical Officer

Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director of Clinical Pharmacology and Developmental Therapeutics, Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Research Center, Univ of California, Irvine.  Extensive track record of governmental and industry grants and cancer related patents.  Previously, chemotherapy resistance research at the NCI, Chief Scientific Officer at Oncotech, developer of the extreme drug resistance assay. MD/PhD from Rush University.

Board

Arra Yerganian

Board Member & Head of Marketing

Arra Yerganian, Board Member and Head of Marketing leads our sales and marketing initiatives. Arra has been a Chief Marketing Officer of several publicly traded companies, including One Medical and Sutter Health and his mission is to help leaders be bold and grow to make a tangible impact for our society. Arra is also on the Board of various non-profits, including the Dean’s Advisory Board for the Boston School of Public Health.

William Werkmeister, MPA, MBA

Board Director

Bill is a Founding Partner of the International Cancer Impact Fund and serves on the Advisory Board of the National Foundation for Cancer Research. Bill holds a BS from Cornell, an MPA from Harvard, and an MBA from Yale.

Eyal Granit, BSc

Board Observer

Eyal is an investor of SAGE and is our first Board Observer. He is the Founder and CEO of Escapade Ventures, Co-founder and Managing Member of Codex3, and an angel investor. Eyal is a veteran of the tech industry with 20 years of wide-ranging experience working on avionics and air traffic control systems, virtual machines, distributed databases and file systems, cloud environments, networks, and consumer products. Eyal holds a BSc in Computer Science and a BSc in Mathematics from Technion.

Other Team Members

Amanda Natalizio, PhD

CLIA Advisor

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Ricardo Parker, PhD

Director of Cancer Research

Ricardo directs our cancer research activities leveraging his experience at the NCI and Director of the CLIA lab at Oncotech, who developed the extreme drug resistance assay.  Ricardo is also a Professor and Director of the BS Program at the National University. He holds a PhD in Microbiology from Oregon State University and MS in Biology at Tennessee State.

Brian Leyland-Jones, MD, PhD

Scientific Advisor

Chief Medical Officer and Scientific Advisory Board Member for the National Foundation for Cancer Research and Chief Scientific Officer of The Darwin Foundation.  Dr. Leyland-Jones held leadership positions at Cornell, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Emory University, and the NCI, and helped develop leading drugs for breast cancer (platinum drugs), and targeted therapies trastuzumab (Herceptin®) and bevacizumab (Avastin®).