Melior Announces Substantial Additions to Its Management and Scientific Team

• Dr. Ken Kilgore joins Melior as VP of Scientific Operations
• Dr. Hongyan Li joins Melior as Director of Oncology
• Dr. Vivian Cong rises to VP of Research & Development

EXTON, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--#canceranimalmodels--Melior Discovery, Inc. (Melior) announced today significant additions to its management organization. Joining the Melior organization will be Dr. Ken Kilgore (PhD, MBA) as Vice President of Pharmacology. Also joining Melior will be Dr. Hongyan Li as Director of Oncology. In addition, Melior veteran, Dr. Vivian Cong, will rise to the role of Vice President of Research and Development.

Dr. Kilgore is a twenty-five-year industry veteran having initiated his career in the pharma industry at Pfizer before moving on to GlaxoSmithKline and then Janssen where he attained the level of the Director of Early Proof-of-Concept Team in Immunology. In 2020 he left Janssen to become the Chief Scientific Investment Officer for the Beyond Celiac organization. Over the entire span of his career Dr. Kilgore has dedicated himself as an in vivo pharmacologist in therapeutic areas including inflammation, immunology, pain, and pulmonology.

Dr. Li has been a practicing in vivo pharmacologist for over thirty years and worked at the National Institute of Health (Bethesda) for 4 years as a as a research fellow studying vitamin C in a variety of cancer therapies before moving to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. There she rose to the level of Research Associate where she was responsible for managing Sloan’s core facility for cancer animal models. In this capacity she designed and performed studies in xenograft and syngenic tumor models, including patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models, with a host of therapeutic approaches including chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapies.

Prior to joining Melior six years ago Dr. Cong dedicated her studies to preclinical in vivo pharmacology research in the areas on metabolic disease and neurodegeneration in research institutions including the National Institute of Health (Bethesda) and The Hospital for Sick Children (Toronto). Over the years that she has been at Melior Dr. Cong has taken on increasing responsibility, developing new animal models in new therapeutic areas and thereby expanding Melior’s repertoire and capability across broad therapeutic area space. Today, Dr. Cong has different levels of involvement in all models that are performed at Melior.

More detailed biographical information on these individuals can be found on Melior’s website.

“I am proud of the fact that in this very challenging hiring market, Melior has been able to attract not only these very talented senior veterans that bring such a wealth of capability and knowledge to Melior, but also an array of talented more junior people as well,” said Andrew Reaume, president and CEO of Melior. “It's a testimony to the vibrant and fulfilling environment that we have developed here as well as a demonstration of quantum growth that Melior is experiencing.”

About Melior

Melior Discovery and its sister companies, Melior Pharmaceuticals I, Inc. and Melior Pharmaceuticals II, LLC, are leaders in pharmaceutical drug repositioning using the unique theraTRACE^® platform comprised of multiplexed in vivo disease models. Melior is using these capabilities to build an internal pipeline of development candidates and also partners with pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies to apply the theraTRACE^® platform and its in-depth in vivo pharmacology expertise to their development candidates. Melior Discovery and Melior Pharmaceuticals are privately held and located in Exton, PA. For more information, visit www.meliordiscovery.com and www.meliorpharma.com.

Andrew Reaume, Ph.D., MBA
President and CEO
Melior Discovery, Inc.
(+1) 610-280-0633 ext 239
e-mail: areaume@meliordiscovery.com