Dr. Vince Groppi is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Oricula Therapeutics, LLC, a start-up biotechnology company with a mission to develop medicines that protect hearing and balance from the effects of ototoxic drugs and aging.
Dr. Groppi was the Director of the Center for the Discovery of New Medicines, and Director of the Center for Chemical Genomics, at the University of Michigan from 2015 to 2019. The CDNM is a virtual center that supports early-stage, innovative drug-discovery research projects across the university.
Previously, Dr. Groppi was the vice president and chief scientific officer of Essen BioScience, an integrated bioscience company that developed technologies to solve therapeutically important problems in cancer and neuroscience. Prior to this, he held positions at Upjohn, Pharmacia and Pfizer leading discovery, development and strategy teams. During the course of his extensive and distinguished career, Dr. Groppi led teams that advanced nine compounds into clinical development.
Dr. Groppi holds a doctorate from the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and was a postdoc and assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco. He is currently a member of a translational review panel for the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and is a standing member of an NIH/NINDS translational study section. Dr. Groppi teaches translational pharmacology at the University of Michigan.
Dr. Groppi’s expertise includes target identification and validation, assay development, knowledge-based and broad-screening strategies, driving lead optimization, establishing in vivo efficacy, defining pharmacokinetics, efficient use of regulatory toxicology and identifying translational biomarkers for preclinical and clinical decision making. Early in his career, he co-invented an instrument for cell-based drug screening and mechanistic assays called Fluorescent Imaging Plate Reader, or FLIPR, which has become an important technology in high-throughput screening and lead optimization.