PHILADELPHIA– Vivodyne, a biotech that accelerates the successful discovery, design, and development of human therapeutics, today announced the appointment of Elliot Menschik, M.D., Ph.D., to the company’s Board of Directors and to the executive role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Dr. Menschik brings more than 25 years of industry experience as a serial entrepreneur, startup investor, executive, Board director and educator.
Prior to joining Vivodyne, Dr. Menschik was part of the founding leadership team at Resilience, a biomanufacturing partner to therapeutics companies where he was Chief Digital Officer. During his tenure, he helped build Resilience from its inception to a team of over 3,000 across North America. As CDO, Dr. Menschik was responsible for all things #techbio across enterprise, laboratory, and cGMP manufacturing domains, including product development, infrastructure, applications, automation, data, compliance, and security.
Earlier, Dr. Menschik was an executive at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he designed, launched and led the company’s global industry specialization initiative for investors and their portfolio companies across sectors that included biotech and machine learning/AI. In this role, he worked closely with hundreds of venture-backed and publicly-listed biotechs, putting Amazon’s people and technology to work on their behalf to accelerate scientific, engineering, and commercial efforts.
“We’re very excited to have Elliot join Vivodyne as our CTO. His wealth of experience in building and scaling techbio and healthcare companies is a perfect match for our ambitious growth plans as Vivodyne continues to gain momentum,” said Andrei Georgescu, CEO and Co-Founder of Vivodyne. “Elliot’s strategic leadership and deep-seated expertise in scaling hardware, software, and AI platforms, products, and operations are key assets that will propel Vivodyne into an exciting new phase of development.”
“I’ve had the good fortune to work with quite a few exceptional companies that combine biology, chemistry, automation, data science, machine learning, and cloud computing to do science that was previously impossible and to successfully apply those breakthroughs to bringing new medicines to market,” said Menschik. “Vivodyne represents the next-generation of such ventures with unbounded potential as a platform therapeutics company. In a very short period of time, a small team has integrated novel biology, robotics, and computation to discover, develop, and de-risk new therapeutics using functional, lifelike, lab-grown human organs with massive throughput and high-quality IND-enabling data. I’m stoked to contribute and to help take these advances to the next level.”
Dr. Menschik was also Managing Partner at Dreamit Ventures, where he founded and led its healthcare and life science practice, seeding and guiding over 40 healthtech, diagnostics, and device startups. Earlier, he was the founder and CEO of several exited ventures, and he has served on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania teaching science and engineering students how to launch and operate startups of their own.
He received his M.D. and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, specializing in computational neuroscience research on Alzheimer’s disease and memory function. He received his MSE and BSEE degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University specializing in chip design.
