CytoSorbents Corporation (NASDAQ: CTSO), a critical care immunotherapy leader commercializing its CytoSorb blood purification technology to treat deadly inflammation in critically-ill and cardiac surgery patients around the world, announces additions to its international clinical team.
Prof. Dr. Zsolt Molnár, MD, joins the clinical team of CytoSorbents Europe as Medical Director, playing an important role in bridging Clinical & Medical Affairs and Therapy Management. Prof. Molnár was formerly head of the Department of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Therapy at University of Szeged in Hungary since 2009. He has published extensively, with more than 90 articles in the area of critical care medicine, with major basic and clinical research interests in sepsis, hemodynamic stability, fluid therapy, markers of inflammation, cytokine reduction, oxygen debt, and perioperative intensive care. A well-known critical care intensivist and outstanding invited speaker, Prof. Molnar has given more than 100 lectures over the past 5 years at international critical care conferences. One of his most important initiatives was the founding and leading of SepsEast, the most prominent Central and Eastern European sepsis forum. He is a member of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM) and a general member and member of the intensive care subcommittee of the European Society of Anaesthesiology (ESA). Prof. Molnár has been a reviewer for many leading critical care and anesthesiology journals and a member of the editorial board of several international journals.
Dr. Albert T. Leung, MD, PhD, joins the U.S. clinical team as Senior Director, Clinical Affairs. Dr. Leung is a clinical endocrinologist and clinical development and trial specialist, who recently served as Chief Medical Officer of GlySure Ltd, a medical device company in the United Kingdom that developed an intravascular continuous blood glucose monitor for critically-ill patients. Prior to this, he was Executive Director of Clinical Research, Diabetes and Endocrinology at Merck Research Laboratories, leading clinical trials as Section Head for the Bone and Endocrine division. With more than 20 years of clinical trials experience and drug development, Dr. Leung will focus on driving company-sponsored studies in the U.S. and elsewhere. Dr. Leung completed his fellowship in Endocrinology at the Massachusetts General Hospital at Harvard Medical School, and his internal medicine residency at the Beth Israel Hospital at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. He received his MD/PhD at the Carver College of Medicine at University of Iowa, and his B.A. degree from Washington University, St. Louis, MO.
Dr. Peter J. Nelson, MD, FASN, was named Senior Director of Clinical Affairs on the U.S. clinical team. Dr. Nelson is a Board-certified internist and nephrologist, and formerly an Associate Professor of Medicine at University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle, WA. There, he served as the Regional Clinical Center Principal Investigator, establishing the infrastructure and funding to create a team of regional medical centers (University of Washington Medical Center, Harborview Medical Center, Seattle Children's Hospital, and Spokane Sacred Heart Medical Center) as a catchment network for subjects in the Pacific Northwest, and as a consortia to run observational and interventional clinical trials. Dr. Nelson also headed a basic science translational research program at the University of Washington. At CytoSorbents, Dr. Nelson helps to manage the U.S. REFRESH 2-AKI and U.K. TICAG trials and works with the R&D team on pre-clinical translational studies that support the clinical development pipeline. Dr. Nelson completed his medical degree, internal medicine residency, and fellowship in nephrology from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, and has over 20 years of experience in clinical practice. He received his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.
Dr. Phillip Chan, MD, PhD, Chief Executive Officer of CytoSorbents stated, "We are pleased to have such depth of experience in clinical medicine and clinical trials at the company and look forward to driving clinical studies to make CytoSorb® available worldwide as a standard of care therapy in many different conditions."
About CytoSorbents Corporation (NASDAQ: CTSO)
CytoSorbents Corporation is a leader in critical care immunotherapy, specializing in blood purification. Its flagship product, CytoSorb® is approved in the European Union with distribution in 58 countries around the world, as an extracorporeal cytokine adsorber designed to reduce the "cytokine storm" or "cytokine release syndrome" that could otherwise cause massive inflammation, organ failure and death in common critical illnesses. These are conditions where the risk of death is extremely high, yet no effective treatments exist. CytoSorb® is also being used during and after cardiac surgery to reduce inflammatory mediators that can lead to post-operative complications, including multiple organ failure. CytoSorbents is conducting its pivotal REFRESH 2-AKI trial – a multi-center, randomized controlled, clinical trial intended to support U.S. regulatory approval of CytoSorb for use in a heart-lung machine during complex cardiac surgery to reduce organ injury. The Company has also initiated the company-sponsored U.K. TICAG trial evaluating the removal of ticagrelor in emergency cardiac surgery patients. CytoSorb® has been used in more than 67,000 human treatments to date.
CytoSorbents' purification technologies are based on biocompatible, highly porous polymer beads that can actively remove toxic substances from blood and other bodily fluids by pore capture and surface adsorption. Its technologies have received non-dilutive grant, contract, and other funding of approximately $29 million from DARPA, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and others. The Company has numerous products under development based upon this unique blood purification technology protected by many issued U.S. and international patents and multiple applications pending, including CytoSorb-XL™, HemoDefend™, VetResQ™, K+ontrol™, ContrastSorb, DrugSorb, and others. For more information, please visit the Company's websites at www.cytosorbents.com and www.cytosorb.com or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
