Executive Officers and Directors

President and CEO:
Elliott Fineman, M.S., J.D., joined PLANET in 1998. He founded and served as Chief Operating Officer, Vice President and Director of Licensing and Intellectual Property of SuperGen, Inc., from January 1991 to August 1995. At SuperGen, he established facilities in Emeryville and Chicago, recruited the financial and operating management team, and assisted the CEO to develop overall company vision and strategy. He served as a general partner in two partnerships established to initially fund SuperGen's product development. He was instrumental in raising $15 million in early stage capital from private and corporate investors. In addition to Licensing and Intellectual Property responsibilities at SuperGen, he managed pre-clinical development for several products currently in clinical trials. He also contracted for sourcing several bulk drugs from China and Japan including doxorubicin, mitomycin C, daunorubicin, bleomycin, and paclitaxel and carried out GMP compliance audits for FDA approval in connection with Company ANDAs and INDs. From 1984 through 1991, Mr. Fineman held a series of positions of increasing responsibility at Cetus Corporation (later acquired by Chiron Corporation, Emeryville, CA) starting out as Senior Patent Attorney and ending as Director of Corporate Licensing. Prior to Cetus, he was a Senior Patent Attorney at Stauffer Chemical Company, with primary responsibility for agricultural biotechnology, and a patent Attorney in private practice. He holds a J.D. (1981) from the University of Baltimore where he served on the Law Review, an M.S. degree in Biology (1976) from Georgetown University where he was a University Fellow, and a BA with Honors in Biology (1972) from Oberlin College.

Vice President and Chief Technical Officer:
James W. Larrick, M.D. Ph.D. has an international reputation in biotechnology [cytokines, therapeutic antibodies, molecular biology, pharmaceutical drug development] having written or co-authored eight books, over 220 papers/chapters and fifteen patents. He serves on the editorial board of six journals. Dr. Larrick has worked on various aspects of therapeutic antibodies and other protein therapeutics for the past 20 years.

Dr. Larrick received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC. After housestaff training in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Stanford Cancer Biology Research Labs with Professor Henry S. Kaplan. In 1982, he joined Cetus Immune Research Labs, Palo Alto, CA, where he became Director of Research in 1986. While at Cetus he pioneered the use of PCR for the construction of recombinant antibodies.  In 1988 he moved to Genelabs Inc., Redwood City, CA, as Director of Exploratory Research. In 1991, Dr. Larrick founded the Palo Alto Institute of Molecular Medicine, a non-profit research institute situated near Stanford University. Since then he has founded more than a dozen biopharmaceutical companies: Panorama Research Inc., Planet Biotechnology Inc., Kalobios, Nugen Technologies, Medlogic, Panolife Products, PanResearch, Neuromolecular, Absalus,  and Quality Clinical Labs, are based in California;  PanGenetics B.V.  (merged with Tanox Inc.) and TargetQuest B.V. (merged with Dyax Inc.) are headquartered in The Netherlands.  Currently  he serves on the Boards of five early stage companies and continues to pursue entrepreneurial activities through TENEX Medical Investors in Silicon Valley and 7X, an investment fund he co-founded in The Netherlands.

Chairman:
Jeffrey S. Price, Ph.D., as President and CEO of Neurobiological Technologies Inc., Richmond, CA (until May, 1997), raised approximately $30 million, including an IPO in February 1994, and brought four products into phase II clinical trials. Dr. Price was formerly Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Cetus Corporation, (later acquired by Chiron Corporation, Emeryville, CA), where he directed a staff of approximately 500 scientists, engineers, physicians and support personnel. Two new therapeutic human proteins now on the market worldwide were developed under Dr. Price's management of Cetus' R&D. PCR DNA amplification, the only biotechnology company invention to result in a Nobel Prize, was also discovered and developed by Dr. Price's R&D team. He was a member of the executive management team at Cetus that raised approximately $500 million in financing. Dr. Price, a founder and director of PLANET, has extensive experience in several critical areas including business and technology management, drug development, operations and finance. He is also presently Chairman of the Board of Directors of Octamer, Inc., a company producing therapeutic drug products through conventional synthetic chemistry means.