Philip Wills, Ph.D., has been appointed chief commercial officer, Paragon Bioservices, John Conner has been appointed chief manufacturing officer, and William Thomas, Jr., Ph.D., was named chief scientific officer.
 
Also, Randy Henrickson was named vice president of manufacturing and Dermot McCaul was named vice president of information technology.
 
Dr. Wills played a key role in the growth of Paragon Bioservices, helping to build the company’s global CDMO business in the gene therapy and vaccine space. He joined Paragon as group leader of assay development in July 2002 and held many key positions during his tenure. 
 
“Since joining Paragon, Philip has played a vital role in growing our organization and helping us pivot to our new and aggressive growth strategy. He’s led the way in building our current brand as well as solidifying our position in the marketplace,” said president and chief executive officer of Paragon Bioservices, Pete Buzy. 
 
Mr. Conner is a biotechnology operations executive with more than 30 years of experience in the areas of manufacturing, process development, analytical, manufacturing science and technology operations. Mr. Conner was most recently senior vice president of operations at Cytovance Biologics, where he was responsible for building the operations team, manufacturing facilities and GMP systems, and providing world-class GMP manufacturing over several biologic platforms. 
 
“John’s experience and leadership in driving our growth, while expanding our manufacturing capabilities to meet burgeoning client needs, including our anticipated commercial manufacturing capacity in the next few years, has been invaluable to Paragon,” said Mr. Buzy. 
 
Dr. Thomas will support collaborative partnerships for the scientific aspects of product development. Dr. Thomas has more than 25 years of experience in the development and manufacture of vaccines and monoclonal antibodies. Before joining Paragon in 2016, he spent the last 15 years with MassBiologics at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he was responsible as Deputy Director for Product Discovery, Process Development and Manufacturing.
 
“Bill has significantly advanced our scientific reputation and is evolving Paragon’s client relationships to be that of collaborative partnerships,” added Mr. Buzy.  
 
Mr. Henrickson is an accomplished senior-level manufacturing leader with more than 20 years of experience within the biopharma industry. At KBI Biopharma, he served as senior vice president and site head where he was responsible for operations, client interactions, R&D and process development functions at the Boulder, CO. Prior to this, he held senior level positions at Merck and Amgen leading technical operations and process development. 
 
Mr. McCaul will leverage his technical and business expertise to move the company to a multi-site platform that can be scaled to accommodate growth. Mr. McCaul spent his career with Merck, starting in Vaccine Manufacturing in multiple roles in Quality Assurance, Operations, and Engineering and culminating as the director of Global IT Research for Preclinical Small Molecule development. 
 
“We have built a world-class team to complement the Company’s outstanding pre-clinical development and later-stage manufacturing capabilities,” added Mr. Buzy. “With Randy and Dermot joining our team, we are further expanding our capabilities to continue growing our value proposition as a leader in manufacturing gene therapies and next-generation vaccines.”