By Sara Gilgore – Staff Reporter, Washington Business Journal -Mar 12, 2025 - Gaithersburg’s Shuttle Pharmaceuticals Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: SHPH) has brought in a new executive to spearhead the biotech’s business activity, freeing up its longtime leader, a cancer doctor and physician administrator, to focus on research and development.
The company’s co-founder and chief executive, Dr. Anatoly Dritschilo, is now one of two co-CEOs, and will oversee the clinical trials and scientific work required to get its lead candidate for an aggressive brain cancer to patients. And Christopher Cooper, a former oil and gas industry exec who also leads a telecommunications company, has joined Shuttle as the other co-CEO on an interim basis. He will focus on the business activity and raising money through the capital markets, the firm said Wednesday.
Dritschilo, also the board chairman, said in an email that the addition of a seasoned business executive like Cooper allows him to focus on his "passion" of advancing new diagnostic and therapeutic discoveries.
"A disproportionate demand on a biotech CEO’s time comes from the business side of the company, including management of accounting, audits, SEC rules, Nasdaq requirements and, of course, raising capital," he said. "There is clearly room for job sharing."
He added that while Cooper's title is interim co-CEO, that could change depending on how the arrangement is working.
“Future decisions regarding this position will be informed by our experience going forward,” he said.
The new structure gives the company a better model to prioritize R&D, as well as regulatory and business operations, Cooper said in a statement. It’s running a phase 2 clinical trial of ropidoxuridine for patients with glioblastoma, with the hopes of eventually pushing that product to the market.
Dritschilo — an academic and physician administrator, as he described himself in a recent interview — will focus on that clinical work. He’ll also oversee subsidiary Shuttle Diagnostics, which is developing blood tests to predict outcomes for prostate cancer patients, while Shuttle Pharma is developing therapies to make radiation less harmful and more effective.
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