TrialSpark Bolsters Executive Team and Industry Experience with Two Key Hires

- Quentin Chu joins as the company's President & Chief Financial Officer

- Dr. Ken Somberg, former CMO at Covance, joins as the company's Chief Medical Officer

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Nov 07, 2019, 08:00 ET

NEW YORK, Nov. 7, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- TrialSpark, a tech-enabled drug development partner committed to improving the speed, quality and innovation of clinical trials, announced today the appointment of Quentin Chu and Dr. Ken Somberg to the company's executive leadership team as President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Chief Medical Officer (CMO), respectively.

"Innovation in highly regulated markets like healthcare requires a balance of innovative industry experts, first-principle thinking outsiders who can contribute new perspectives and passionate leaders who can help build and develop the best teams," said Benjamine Liu, CEO and co-founder of TrialSpark. "Ken Somberg's experiences as CMO of Covance and long history of leadership across pharma, CROs and biotech will be invaluable as we innovate to make clinical trials more efficient and establish ourselves as a leading drug development partner. Quentin Chu's experience scaling operationally intensive businesses in healthcare, like CityMD, where patient satisfaction, operational efficiency and provider utilization are inextricably linked to financial performance will be highly relevant to the challenges we will face as we grow TrialSpark. Quentin and Ken will both provide critical leadership as we pursue our mission to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently."

As CMO, Ken Somberg will be responsible for leading and scaling all of TrialSpark's clinical and medical organization. He will also oversee and build out the company's core drug development offerings and end-to-end trial services in addition to contributing to company strategy and operations. After spending 12 years at Novartis where he served as the Therapeutic Area Head for Clinical Research, and later, in Regulatory Affairs for the Transplantation and Immunology Business Unit, Somberg joined Covance Inc. as CMO in 2009. Most recently, Somberg served as CMO of Nevakar Inc., where he focused on developing innovative products in injectable and ophthalmic therapeutics. Somberg holds a bachelor's degree from Stanford University and went on to earn his MBA from Duke University and his MD from Baylor College of Medicine, concluding his education by becoming a fellow in gastroenterology from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he also spent five years as a faculty member of the University's school of medicine.

"Clinical research is a field ripe for disruption and a rethinking of how to best generate evidence behind innovative medicines, with the end goal of getting more treatments, to more patients, more quickly," commented Somberg. "As a physician I am fascinated by TrialSpark's vision and eager to extend the impact of TrialSpark's unique model to more practices and more investigational products."

As President and CFO, Quentin Chu will lead the company's core business operations along with its supporting functions, including sales and marketing, finance, human resources, legal and investor relations. Prior to joining TrialSpark, Chu was the Chief Financial Officer at CityMD, the largest provider of urgent care services in the New York metropolitan area. His experience in healthcare, paired with a unique background in private equity with positions at Crestview Partners and The Carlyle Group, will be instrumental as TrialSpark executes its growth strategy. Chu holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

"TrialSpark has tremendous growth potential through our innovative delivery model, partnerships with industry leaders and world class investor base," commented Chu. "TrialSpark represents a unique intersection between technology and medicine, and I look forward to working with the team on executing our strategic plan and amplifying our impact on the drug development process."

Both executives will be based in TrialSpark's New York office and will report to TrialSpark CEO and co-founder Benjamine Liu.

About TrialSpark
TrialSpark's mission is to bring treatments to patients faster and more efficiently by reimagining the clinical trial process. TrialSpark has scaled a network of trial sites by partnering with doctors to create clinical trial sites within their existing practices. TrialSpark runs trials out of these doctors' practices using a roaming cohort of certified research coordinators, optimized by software, data and technology. By limiting variability in operations at the trial site level, TrialSpark reduces the manual, time intensive and costly tasks that delay clinical trial timelines. By creating trial sites with doctors, TrialSpark unlocks the 98% of patients who have never been exposed to trials, boosting recruitment and enrollment rates and democratizing access.

Contact: Kevin Donovan, [email protected]

SOURCE TrialSpark