James B. Frakes

Interim Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer

Mr. Frakes joined Aethlon Medical in January 2008. He has 27 years of CFO level financial responsibility for publicly traded companies, as well as, specific knowledge and experience in equity (IPO, follow-on public offerings and private placements) and debt transactions, acquisitions, public reporting and Sarbanes-Oxley section 404 internal control requirements.

Mr. Frakes received an MBA from the University of Southern California, and completed his BA with Honors at Stanford University.

Guy Cipriani

Chief Operating Officer

Mr. Cipriani had served on Aethlon's Board of Directors since June 2018. Prior to joining Aethlon as an executive, he served as the Chief Business Officer at Microbion Corporation, a company focused on the development of a new class of antibiotic therapies for difficult to treat and resistant infections. His business and corporate development responsibilities at Microbion included securing partnerships and raising dilutive and non-dilutive capital for the company's promising clinical-stage pipeline. Prior to Microbion, he served as VP of Business Development at Cascadian Therapeutics where he was responsible for licensing-in several promising pipeline candidates and generating external interest in the company's clinical-stage pipeline to set the stage for future strategic transactions. Prior to that role, Mr. Cipriani served as VP of Business Development at Cardiome Pharma Corp. where he led the negotiation of a global development and co-commercialization licensing deal with Merck & Company in 2009 around the company's lead Phase 3 cardiovascular program. Prior to Cardiome, Mr. Cipriani served as Sr. Director of Business Development for TransForm Pharmaceuticals, Inc., where his efforts helped facilitate the company's acquisition by Johnson and Johnson for $230 million in 2005. Mr. Cipriani began his pharmaceutical industry career at Eli Lilly & Company as a member of their Corporate Business Development team where he completed multiple in-licensing and out-licensing transactions for commercial, clinical and preclinical state assets. Mr. Cipriani holds a B.S.E.E., High Honors from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.

Lee D. Arnold, PhD

Chief Scientific Officer

Lee is a creative scientific leader with 36 years of accomplishments in molecularly-targeted drug discovery.  After an initial 8 publications in biophysics and biochemistry as an undergraduate at University of Waterloo, he earned a PhD in Organic Chemistry from University of Alberta.  Lee began his career in pharma research at Syntex (Canada), and then joined Pfizer, where he was the inventor of Tarceva® (erlotinib) for NSCLC.  During his tenure at BASF/Abbott Bioresearch Center, he established medicinal & combinatorial chemistry operations, and initiated and led two multinational multidisciplinary projects in angiogenesis leading to linifanib (ABT-869).  As Vice President of Research at OSI Pharmaceuticals, Lee and his teams efficiently discovered four oncology development candidates, including the “first-in-class” agents linsitinib (IGF-1R), and ASP7486 (TORC1/2). 

His acquired proficiency in synthetic & medicinal chemistry and structure-based drug design (SBDD), coupled with his broad research experience in target validation, assay development, HTS, and drug metabolism, facilitated his leadership of multidisciplinary discovery efforts as Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) in a number of innovative start-up biotechs. These included Kinagen, Coferon (self-assembling drug molecules), and Assembly Biosciences (co-invention of vebicorvir and ABI-H2158 for hepatitis B).   As Senior VP of Research at Kinnate Biopharma, he was a coinventor of KIN-2787 (RAF), KIN-3248 (FGFR2/3), which are currently in clinical trials.  Just prior to joining Aethlon Medical, Lee was the CSO and cofounder of Pardes Biosciences, which was founded at the start of the COVID pandemic as a virtual company that discovered and advanced the oral protease inhibitor, pomotrelvir, into clinical trials for SARS-CoV2 in only 17 months.  Overall, Lee’s inventive and leadership contributions in drug discovery and development to date have resulted in an approved drug, and 16 additional development candidates, currently fueling 8 clinical trials in oncology, immunology and virology.  These achievements are documented in over 94 published patents and applications, and more than 39 peer-reviewed publications.

Steven LaRosa, M.D.

Chief Medical Officer

Prior to joining Aethlon, Dr. LaRosa served as the Vice President of Clinical Development of Entasis Therapeutics, a spin-out of AstraZeneca focused on pathogen-targeted small molecules to treat serious multidrug-resistant Gram-negative infections. In this role, he acted as medical lead and was responsible for the clinical development of multiple programs, two of which were in Phase III clinical trials. Prior to joining Entasis, Dr. LaRosa was an Attending Physician and Antimicrobial Stewardship Director in the Division of Infectious Disease at Beverly Hospital, a member of Beth Israel Lahey Health (BILH) in Massachusetts. Prior to BILH, he was an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Brown Medical School and Attending Physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Rhode Island Hospital. He was also the Director and a Co-founder of the Ocean State Clinical Coordinating Center (OSCCC), an academic CRO that partnered with industry sponsors on clinical trials in Infectious Disease and Sepsis. Prior to that, Dr. LaRosa was a Staff Physician in the Department of Infectious Disease at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and a Principle Investigator on numerous sepsis clinical trials. He also served as a Clinical Research Physician for Eli Lilly and Company where he led the Phase III clinical trial of recombinant human activated Protein C (Xigris); the only agent ever FDA approved for sepsis. Dr. LaRosa received his M.D. from Boston University School of Medicine (Alpha Omega Alpha). He completed an Internal Medicine residency and was Chief Resident at the Cleveland Clinic. This was followed by a clinical and research fellowship in Infectious Disease at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He holds active Board Certifications in Internal Medicine and Infectious Disease.

John Nguyen

Vice President of Manufacturing

John is an operations and technical leader with 25 years in biotech and life sciences, developing and manufacturing medical devices, building scalable team structures, and managing product lines and high-profile projects with oversight of implementations for process improvements and cost savings.  John started his career at Biosite, Inc. (later became Alere, Inc.) and spent 20 years with the company in various roles in product development, technical product transfers, and operations.  Prior to joining Aethlon Medical, John was at Nexus Dx as Director of Technical Operations, then promoted to Vice President of Operations and responsible for the development and transfer of new products into manufacturing with responsibility for design transfer, operational readiness, manufacturability, and process and equipment development.  John has an extensive chemistry background and has worked on a multitude of diverse assay development, particle chemistry, antibody conjugations, solid phase, biotinylation and others.  John holds a Bachelor of Arts in Biology from the University of San Diego.