Richard A. Messmann

Richard is an NCI fellowship-trained medical oncologist with extensive experience in clinical trials in oncology and radiologic imaging. He served as Deputy Associate Director of the NCI Developmental Therapeutics Program (DTP) managing the division’s personnel, natural products group, biological and pharmaceutical laboratories at Ft. Detrick, MD, as well as being an attending physician for DTP Phase 1 clinical trials. After government service, Richard was an academic oncologist at Michigan State University, heading the breast cancer team as Principal Investigator for several National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP) cooperative group trials. His pharmaceutical and biotech experience includes being a clinical research physician at Eli Lilly and Company and serving as Vice President for Medical Affairs at Endocyte, Inc. where his leadership supported a successful IPO for the company (Feb 2011) and a $1B licensing partnership with Merck (March 2012).

Prior to joining Apexian, Richard was the Chief Medical Officer for ProNAi Therapeutics directing development of a BCL2-targeted therapeutic agent, closing on the largest single round of venture capital funding in Michigan’s history, a series D round of $59.5 million before taking the company public in July 2015, raising $158.4 million in the IPO. He has degrees in electrical and computer engineering (B.S., Oakland University), health science and clinical research (M.H.S., Duke University) and biochemistry and medicine (M.Sc. and M.D., Wayne State University). Residency training included anesthesiology and critical care (Georgetown University and University of Michigan) and Internal Medicine (Michigan State University) where he served as chief resident. Richard is a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, American Association for Cancer Research, American Society of Hematology and European Society for Medical Oncology. He is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.