About the Jaime Leandro Foundation

for Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines

The Jaime Leandro Foundation (JLF) is a private nonprofit organization established to deliver breakthrough cancer treatments. We are a unique consortium of experts in cancer, personalized medicine, clinical trials, and vaccines leveraging the FDA’s Expanded Access rule, also known as “compassionate use,” to develop personalized cancer vaccines.

 

JLF Partners

  • CSBio is a leading peptide and instrumentation manufacturing company located on the edge of Silicon Valley in Menlo Park, California. Since 1993, CSBio has been providing high quality custom peptides, cGMP peptides and automated peptide synthesizers to the global pharmaceutical community. CSBio peptide products and instrumentation can be found in production laboratories and pharmaceutical companies worldwide, and it is the vaccine manufacturer for the Jaime Leandro Foundation (JLF). Learn more at csbio.com.

  • ennov1 empowers cancer patients to identify personalized treatment options created from their genomic data. Its cloud-based platform provides a clear way to manage your entire cancer journey from diagnosis and disease progression through treatment response and regression. As a JLF partner, ennov1 uses sequencing bioinformatics to predict neoantigens and designs vaccine peptide components. Learn more at ennov1.com.

  • Washington University School of Medicine is committed to advancing human health throughout the world. As noted leaders in patient care, research and education, its outstanding faculty has contributed many discoveries and innovations to science and medicine since the school’s founding in 1891. As a JLF partner, the WashU team reviews candidate peptides, finalizes and approves the peptide list. Once the vaccine has been manufactured, WashU vials and releases the final injectable peptides, ships the vaccine to the treating physician, and monitors the patient’s immune response. Learn more at medicine.wustl.edu.

  • xCures Inc. operates an AI-assisted platform that connects cancer patients and physicians with optimal investigational or approved therapies. The platform prospectively generates real-world evidence for clinical studies and decentralized trials. As a JLF partner, xCures manages the patient protocol startup and consent with the treating physician, and through the XCELSIOR outcomes registry, centrally collects medical records and safety data. Learn more at xcures.com.

Leadership Team

 

William Hoos

President
Jaime Leandro Foundation for Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines

William Hoos joined JLF in September 2020 as president. He also serves as vice president of strategy with xCures, he is a venture partner at Pilot Mountain Ventures, and founder and CEO of NQ Oncology. In addition, he advises medical diagnostic, device, pharmaceutical and patient advocate organizations globally on product development and market strategy. His past clients include OncoPlexDx (acquired by NantOmics), Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, Skyline Diagnostics BV and Vanda Pharmaceuticals.

Mr. Hoos was previously with Philips Home Healthcare Solutions (Respironics) as Director of New Product Commercialization, where he led the Sleep Well Ventures business in bringing key new products to market. Sleep Well Ventures was established by Respironics as an internal venture group responsible for creating a portfolio of medical devices through business development, acquisitions, and equity investments. While there, Mr. Hoos led new product marketing, strategy and implementation, applied research, clinical trial design, regulatory strategy, and manufacturing. Mr. Hoos led the international launch of a novel insomnia therapy device and designed and defended the US regulatory approval strategy including multiple meetings with the FDA. Additionally, he led the successful integration of an acquisition in light therapy devices and on-time design and launch of their next generation award-winning product.

Prior to Respironics, Mr. Hoos held various roles in R&D and business development. He has also been a software entrepreneur and founded ClinWiki.org which provides crowd sourced clinical trial information. He serves as an Entrepreneur In Residence at Launch Chapel Hill and on the Board of SECU Family House at UNC Hospitals.

Mr. Hoos earned an MBA from Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds a BS Chemistry from Wake Forest University and MS Organic Chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Marty Tenenbaum

Founder & Chairman of the Board
Cancer Commons

Marty Tenenbaum is a renowned computer scientist, Internet entrepreneur and cancer survivor. He founded Cancer Commons and CollabRx (NASD: CRLX) to help each cancer patient obtain the best possible outcome. He is an Internet commerce pioneer and visionary, having founded EIT (1990) and CommerceNet (1994) to accelerate business use of the Internet, and later, was an officer and director of Commerce One, Webify Solutions (sold to IBM in 2006),  and Medstory (sold to Microsoft in 2007). He currently serves on the boards of Efficient Finance, Patients Like Me, and the Public Library of Science (PLoS).

Dr. Tenenbaum is a fellow and former board member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and a former consulting professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and a Ph.D. from Stanford. More at cancercommons.org.

William Gillanders

Professor of Surgery, Division of General Surgery, Section of Endocrine and Oncologic Surgery

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis


Malachi Griffith

Associate Professor of Medicine (Oncology) and Genetics
And Assistant Director of the McDonnell Genome Institute
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Dr. Griffith is Associate Professor of Medicine (Oncology) and Genetics and Assistant Director of the McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University. Dr. Griffith’s research is focused on the development of personalized medicine strategies for cancer. He develops bioinformatics tools and methods for the analysis of high throughput sequence data to improve our understanding of cancer biology, treatment and mechanisms of resistance. In the past few years, immunogenomics has become a major focus of his research. Dr. Griffith is a co-chair of the Global Alliance for Genomic Health Variant Interpretation for Cancer Consortium. He has published over 90 studies, received numerous research awards and honors and held several large grants from the NIH including a K99/R00 Career Development Award. He has mentored more than 50 bioinformatics trainees and taught more than 500 as an instructor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories and the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops.

Andrew Jacobs

CEO

ennov-1

Andrew Jacobs has devoted 40 years to starting and successfully managing and growing small and medium sized companies, as well as several non-profit organizations.  He currently serves as president of Sustainable Agriculture Fund, a small private investment fund he founded in 2011 which provides affordable capital to small and medium sized environmentally sustainable agricultural enterprises.  Andy was previously CEO, President and majority shareholder of PCCW Teleservices (US), Inc. (now HKT Teleservices), a multinational call center service provider, sold to premier Hong Kong telecommunications provider HKT.  Andy’s initial entrepreneurial effort was to found, lead and successfully sell Excel Retirement Communities, a builder, developer and operator of luxury independent and assisted living facilities. Prior to Excel, Andy was a securities and anti-trust litigator at the New York law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell.

Since his “semi-retirement”, Andy has completed several consulting CEO assignments.  From 2020 to January 2022, he was Co-Manager of ennov1 LLC, a start-up company whose mission is to enable cancer patients to gain control of their health data and to use that data to access a wider range of available treatment options (he continues to serve on its Board of Directors), and from 2016 to 2019 was CEO of Upcycle Inc., the developer of a novel, patented process to transform organic waste into usable energy, water and minerals.  

Andy’s non-profit efforts include serving on the founding Board of Directors of Civic Influencers (formerly Campus Election Engagement Project) from 2019-2022 and co-founding Urban Farms of Central Ohio, a non-profit organization whose mission was to grow healthy food on abandoned or underutilized urban property.  He served on the Board of Harlem Grown, a New York City based youth development and urban farming organization (2013 – 2019, Chairman, 2014 – 2018), and is a member of the Donor Services and Development Advisory Committee of The Columbus Foundation, one of the nation’s top community foundations.  

With his wife, Cathy, Andy owns Shaker View Farm, a 200-acre certified organic farm in the Hudson Valley of New York.   

Andy is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Michigan Law School.

Andrew Popp

CTO and Founder

ennov1

Andrew Popp is a lifelong technologist and professional systems engineer who has made a career working in complex on-prem and cloud environments.

During the course of his eight-year career, Andrew has implemented advanced approaches to technical problems resulting in operational excellence and increased business performance. His experience across several tech-industry verticals SaaS, e-commerce, and digital advertising have provided him with the technical skills and business acumen to push technology forward, create technology culture, and keep non-technical stakeholders fully involved in the technical process.

Andrew has previously worked at Wayfair, ServiceChannel Inc, and Ogilvy and Mather. He received a BA from Colby-Sawyer College, New London NH.

Jason Chang

CEO and Chairman

CSBio

Jason Chang is the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of CSBio, a life science company focused on clinical and commercial drug substance manufacturing for new therapeutic peptides.

Chang has more than 10 years of experience as a senior executive and has played an integral role in the growth of CSBio. He oversees key company initiatives in both science and new business verticals. In 2017, the FDA qualified CSBio’s cGMP facility for commercial production. In order to better serve personalized oncology clinical trials and the greater life science industry, Chang is focused on expanding to a second cGMP facility in Milpitas and receiving entitlements to develop a life science incubator in Menlo Park.

Chang has a passion for cars and motorcycles and is often found at the racetrack. He is also a Board Member of the Rector’s Council at Lincoln College (University of Oxford).

A native of the Bay Area, Chang earned his Bachelor of Arts Economics degree at the University of California, San Diego in 2002 and his Master in Biochemistry degree from the University of Oxford in 2009.

Meet Jaime Leandro & Steve Aldrich

 

Jaime Leandro

The foundation is named for Jaime Leandro, who was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer in July 2019. She lived near Boston, Massachusetts with her husband Jason and their three young children, Leo, Zoe, and Eva.

Jaime began receiving standard of care chemotherapy at a prominent academic medical center. Meanwhile, a friend of a friend introduced her to Stephen Aldrich who had been fighting stage 4 adenocarcinoma of the esophagus with success due to, as Steve put it, “a comprehensive, integrative approach” that included the use of “lifestyle changes and complementary modalities along with leveraging the most personalized, cutting-edge precision therapies.” 

Steve and Jaime bonded over the critical importance of disruptive innovation and the promise of personalized medicine. And their unwavering determination.

Steve and other late stage cancer patients had co-founded the innovative MyCancerDB, now Ennov1. They were preparing to launch a service that would provide personalized “N of 1” compassionate access treatments to people diagnosed with incurable cancer.

Managing that service is now the mission of the Jaime Leandro Foundation for Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines.

Throughout her life, people were drawn to Jaime, and in no time, she would have them laughing. She was warm and welcoming, down to earth, and up for anything. In high school and college, she played soccer and ran cross-country, and she developed as an artist, earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. A few years later, she got married and started a family. She turned her creative energies to interior design and DIY projects.

She fought cancer with uncommon bravery and resilience, hoping that her story would help others in the future, she said. Although she lost her fight on March 8, 2020 at age 41, everyone who becomes part of the Jaime Leandro Foundation for Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines helps to make her dream real and transform patients’ lives while contributing to a sea change in cancer treatment and wellness.

 

Steve Aldrich

Educated as an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, Steve Aldrich was a visionary entrepreneur. Early in his career he founded and led Bio Economic Research Associates, LLC (Bio ERA), a firm that provided insight into the economic and societal impacts of enabling biotechnologies. 

In 2017 Steve was diagnosed with terminal metastasized (stage 4) adenocarcinoma of the esophagus. He refused to accept the palliative standard of care indicated for his diagnosis and, instead, decided to pursue integrative curative treatment independently. Read Steve’s “My Entrepreneurial Response to Terminal Cancer.” 

At the beginning of his cancer journey, he obtained his full genomic sequencing data and used it to access personalized immunotherapy options – including a personalized neoantigen vaccine which led to his surviving and thriving for three years beyond expectations. 

He quickly realized his approach to treatment could work for many other people with cancer and, true to his entrepreneurial nature, formed a team who shared his passion and vision to lay the foundation for MyCancerDB, now Ennov1. 

Steve was an extraordinary man who impacted everyone he encountered, including Jaime Leandro who, at age 40, was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Steve and Jaime shared fierce optimism, determination, and a love of life. Jaime believed in Steve’s vision of bringing together the right people to create a true breakthrough in personalized medicine. Those elements have combined to form the Jaime Leandro Foundation for Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines (JLF), a nonprofit organization that Steve requested be named for Jaime.

On July 7, 2020, Steve succumbed to a severe internal reaction to chemo and radiation, not to the cancer itself. After a regrowth of his tumor, recourse had to be made to these traditional and riskier treatments. He passed away with his loving family by his side. 

Losing Steve has only strengthened Ennov1’s commitment to facilitating the rapid identification of safe and effective personalized-treatment options for cancer patients. The company continues to pursue its singular vision while also contributing critical capabilities  to JLF.

Steve was an intelligent, articulate, inspiring, caring, and exceptional man. As Ennov1 states in their tribute to Steve. Read it here.