TRAILBLAZING SPEAKERS

Nikole Kimes

Peter Nara

Dr. Nara is currently on of the co-founders, the Chief Scientific Officer and President Business Development for Keystone Bio Inc. in St. Louis, Mo., a Systemic-Oral Health Biomedical company that is targeting precision microbiome bio-therapeutics for the elimination of a specific oral bacterial associated with systemic inflammation. He is also the former co-founder, President, Chairman and CEO (1997-2017)and now Chairman Emeritus at Biological Mimetics, Inc. and cofounder of Lantern Pharma Inc. He holds a M.Sc. in Immuno-pharmacology, a combined Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and Ph.D. (retro-virology/oncogenesis) from The Ohio State University, 4 year combined residency in Comparative Pathology and NIH post-doctoral Fellowship at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and a NIH respectively. Dr. Nara currently holds the Endowed Eugene Lloyd Chair, Professor in Vaccinology, founding Center Director for the Center for Advanced Host Defense, Immunobiotics, and Translational Comparative Medicine in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Iowa State University and also the Chief Executive Officer, President, Chairman & co-founder of Biological Mimetics, Inc.,. He is also an distinguished Alumni of The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine 2014, and an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011. His comparative medical research interests are to more fully understand how early and pre-determined events in the host innate and acquired immune systems are sculpted and bias the development of protective long lasting responses against infectious pathogens and cancer. More importantly  he and his team are interested developing new technologies and strategies to circumvent the non-protective immune responses for the development of novel classes of immunobiotics and vaccines focused on the prevention of disease and are translating these into viably products via a new academic- private-commercial model. He has been and continues as National and International member of numerous programs at the National Academy of Science, Institutes of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, and Centers for Disease Control AIDS, World Health Organization, United Nations Global AIDS Characterization program–related and infectious diseases national planning, human and animal agricultural biodefense, vaccine development & policy reporting meetings involving pathogenesis, vaccine discovery, standardization, correlates of protection committees and consults and serves on numerous scientific advisory boards of corporate, private foundations and academic initiatives in the area of national biodefense, comparative medicine and immunology, vaccine discovery and immuno-therapeutics and a recent member of the U.S. State Department Bio-Industry Initiative Program, The Civilian Research and Development Foundation (CDRF) and The International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) for non-proliferation of biological agents.

Cheri Ackerman