Eir Pharmaceuticals

William (Bill) Duncan, Ph.D. – Chairman of the Board of Managers

Dr. Duncan’s formal training is in Organic Chemistry, and his astute business acumen has served him well in his 40+ years involved in the performance and management of a broad spectrum of technical activities in human and animal health. Through his efforts in establishing the KC Animal Health Corridor, companies with a strategic business location within the Kansas City Animal Health Corridor now represent 56% of total $88.2bn worldwide animal health, diagnostics and pet food sales. He was the 2016 recipient of the prestigious Iron Paw Award, an animal health industry lifetime achievement award. Some of the many positions Dr. Duncan has successfully held include: President of the Kansas City Life Sciences Institute, Vice President of Technical Operations and Director of Marketing Strategy at Midwest Research Institute (now MRIGlobal). Dr. Duncan serves on the Board of Directors of three animal and/or human health companies. Previously, he served as a board member of KansasBio, MOBIO, and a number of civic leadership organization boards and advisory committees. Dr. Duncan is the author/co-author of 30+ scientific publications, and a member of numerous professional associations and organizations.

D. Andrew Skaff, Ph.D. – Board Manager / Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Skaff’s academic background was primarily focused on the structure/function relationship of metabolic proteins and has provided a foundation for achieving a deeper understanding of biological processes with the goal of discovering solutions for human diseases and control or prevention of microbial infections.  Andrew received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Iowa State University studying the human brain enzyme, hexokinase, and its release from the mitochondrial membrane, which is a potential drug target that would remove the energy source of cancer cells.  With his background in enzyme kinetics, he shifted to large scale screening of compound libraries in search of lead compounds for inhibition of the cholesterol synthesis pathway, which has applications as an alternative to the statin-class of drugs as well as antimicrobial effects.  He then applied the understanding of these physical techniques to computationally screening millions of compounds to aid in more rapidly identifying lead compounds at a significantly lower cost.  As the Principal Scientist at Zorilla Research, Andrew led a number of computational drug discovery projects with both corporate and academic partnerships.

Julie Sailors – Board Manager / Chief Operations Officer
Julie Sailors brings more than fifteen years of operational, financial, and strategic planning experience to Eir Pharmaceuticals. Prior to joining Eir Pharmaceuticals, Julie served as Director of Operations of the Venture Accelerator, a Bioscience incubator formerly owned by Kansas Bioscience Authority. Julie combined a robust structure of contract vendors with sound internal fiscal policies and communication practices as she managed the 40k square foot, certified LEED™ Gold Life Science incubator. She used her extensive knowledge and strong work ethic to perform duties including facility management, accounting activities, financial audits, as well as grant and contract administration. Experience working with Life Science companies has highlighted the value of connecting entrepreneurs and researchers. Julie holds a BS in Systematics and Ecology from the University of Kansas.

Gerald J. Wyckoff, Ph.D. – Eir Pharmaceuticals Board Manager / Interim Chair, Division of Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Missouri – Kansas City

Professor Wyckoff’s educational background is as a molecular evolutionary geneticist, finding faint signatures of positive selection in a sea of genomic noise. His undergraduate degree is a B.S. in Biology from the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and his Ph.D. is from the University of Chicago in Genetics, where he also continued as a post-doctoral fellow looking at evolution in the Department of Human Genetics. This led him to become involved with large scale genomic, and later proteomic, projects. At UMKC, he developed collaborations with structural biology faculty, in part to extend his knowledge of how to apply large-scale screening techniques to structure-based problems. He has helped develop software applications for mass spectrometry analysis relating to analysis of divergent peptides as well as cross-linking analysis. In addition, he helped create databases for large scale synthesis of chemical and biological data in species as diverse as fish and humans. All of these problems have as a common theme, the development of tools to make sense out of large-scale data where noise is high and signal is low. His research led to the development of a computational system that applies evolutionary knowledge to the problems inherent in big data drug discovery.  In 2013, Dr. Wyckoff founded Zorilla Research, which licensed this computational system and is using it to aid in early stage drug discovery and predicting off-target effects.