Our Expert Cell and Gene Therapy Team

Mitch Sivilotti is a respected leader in the Life Sciences industry and serves as the President and Chief Executive Officer of OmniaBio Inc., a CDMO serving the cell and gene therapy market.

Most recently, Mitch was the Chief Operating Officer at CCRM, a Toronto-based cell and gene therapy (CGT) accelerator focused on cell therapy and viral vector manufacturing innovation, company creation and early-stage venture investments. Over the course of six years at CCRM, Mitch was responsible for creating a contract development and manufacturing organization with 200 employees, which grew to become OmniaBio Inc. Before joining CCRM, Mitch was the President of TotipotentRX Corporation, which designed and commercialized sterile disposables for the CGT market, and developed a therapeutic pipeline of candidates for cardiovascular diseases. Its lead product was granted pivotal trial approval in the U.S for Critical Limb Ischemia. TotipotentRX, co-founded by Mitch in 2007, was acquired by Thermogenesis Corporation (Nasdaq: THMO) in 2014. Mitch’s professional career began at Pall Corporation, a Danaher company (NYSE: DHR), where he held several business management and technical positions focused on process equipment and sterile consumables for the advanced therapies market.

Mr. Sivilotti sits on the board of the Standards Coordinating Body for Regenerative Medicine and is a regular contributor to the Forum on Regenerative Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences, where he has supported an ex-officio member seat for CCRM for four years.

Mr. Sivilotti holds a graduate degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the Université Laval (Quebec, Canada) and a graduate degree in Finance from Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada).

Jenifer possesses a unique combination of scientific, regulatory, legal, business development, and commercial expertise and an extensive network across the industry. Her passion is executive leadership in growing and building businesses, finding the key to the relationship between business partners, and negotiating successful long-term partnerships. Jenifer has built and expanded the global business of seven successful CDMOs offering development, manufacturing, and analytical services throughout the entire product lifecycle, including both drug substance and drug product and for multiple modalities. Jenifer’s mantra is “Everyone is in Business Development,” as she believes the collective expertise of scientists, regulatory, development, production, quality, finance, legal and executive teams from internal and external clients are needed to grow the business.

Sherif is a CIO who led major transformation initiatives in multiple industries. His experience spans over 35 years in the Information Technology (IT) and business operations space. He exhibits deep knowledge of business solutions and applications, IT enterprise infrastructure, project/program management and business relationship management. He has extensive history in the software development, automotive, manufacturing and life sciences industries. He worked at large globally matrixed organizations, as well as with private and not-for-profit companies from start-up to established.

When it comes to IT, Sherif’s MO is to Grow | Streamline | Engage. He believes that technology solutions should be used to create a competitive advantage to grow the business, to streamline internal processes to gain efficiencies, and to engage employees through the use of collaboration tools.

Sherif holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from York University and a Bachelor of Engineering degree.

Michael Israels is the Chief Financial Officer of CCRM. Prior to joining CCRM, Michael was a Management Consultant at Ernst & Young LLP, President of BEST Funds, a venture capital company, and CEO of Convexus Managed Services Inc., a start-up fund administration company.

As CFO, Michael is responsible for overseeing operational effectiveness and efficiency at CCRM, the creation and development of start-up regenerative medicine companies, and the sourcing of risk capital.

Lise currently manages various iPSC reprogramming, gene editing, cell banking, scale-up and differentiation projects. For over 8 years, her team has been focused on enabling these processes for manufacturing in GMP environments to produce clinically relevant doses of cell therapy products. This has been done through a thoughtful planning to ensure that the process, analytical controls, technology licenses, specialized staff recruitment, training and GMP documentation were in place. The initial successes from these efforts have been used as models for other internal technology platforms including immunotherapy. Lise earned her PhD at McMaster University focusing on drug discovery in neurodegenerative diseases. Following this, she completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Centre for Applied Neurogenetics at the University of British Columbia where she focused on genetic causes of Parkinson’s Disease.

Tony is an Executive leader with 46 years of pharmaceutical manufacturing expertise in all facets of operations, revenue growth, and quality of production. Tony brings 40 years of manufacturing management with proven turn around time and process improvement, resulting in expense reduction and increase in EBIDA, along with expertise in streamlining and improving processes while strengthening productivity which impacts overall company success. Tony also brings experience with management, overseeing mergers and acquisitions, sales management, and corporate business development.

Tony started as a Chemical Operator at Beecham Labs and was responsible for large scale fermentation (40,000L), as well as chemical reactions where 85% of the world’s Amoxicillin was supplied from this site under multiple labels. In 1990, Tony ventured to start the world’s largest cell culture facility, WelGen Manufacturing Partnership, which is now Amgen’s Enbrel site.