Business Management Team
Gregory M. Fahy, Ph.D.
Dr. Fahy is the Executive Director of 21st Century Medicine, Inc. He manages the strategic focus of the company's highly specialized research projects and is responsible, in cooperation with the Chief Operating Officer, for relationships with other businesses and for the general management of 21st Century Medicine.
Dr. Fahy has a strong history of research management. Before joining 21st Century Medicine, he was the Head of the Tissue Cryopreservation Section of the Transfusion and Cryopreservation Research Program of the U.S. Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and he has served as the Chief Scientist or Chief Scientific Officer of Organ, Inc, LRT, Inc., Longevity Bridge, Inc., and Intervene Immune, Inc. He was the director of organ cryopreservation research at the American National Red Cross' Transplantation Laboratory and Blood Research Laboratory in Maryland for 20 years and has been the Chief Scientific Officer of 21st Century Medicine since 2001, before that serving as the company's Vice President for Cryopreservation Research and as its Director of Research from 1999-2001. Dr. Fahy has been the Vice President of 21st Century Medicine since 1999 and has been a member of its Board of Directors since 1999. He has also served on the Board of Directors of Xytex Research, Inc, and Intervene Immune, Inc. and directed a successful human clinical trial.
A native of California, Dr. Fahy earned his B.S. in biology from the University of California at Irvine and his Ph.D. in pharmacology and cryobiology from the Medical College of Georgia in 1977. He also studied neurobiology at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts in 1980 and received PI Training for Clinical Investigations in 2015.
Harvey J. Horswell
Harvey J. Horswell is Chief Operating Officer for 21st Century Medicine. He has operational and financial responsibilities for day-to-day corporate operations and fully participates in the strategic mission of the company. He manages regulatory compliance, grant reporting, supply chain issues, personnel and payroll issues, research databases, and sales of all 21st Century Medicine products, including our X1000 and Z1000 ice blockers and our cryoprotectant solutions. He brings to the company more than twenty years of prior proven leadership experience establishing corporate policy and objectives, designing quality systems and performing risk analysis.
Mr. Horswell previously served as the Corporate Supply Chain Manager for PGP Industries, Inc. in Santa Fe Springs, CA., where he managed precious metal logistics and directed customer service and material control functions, resulting in doubled profitability. Before that, Mr. Horswell served as a General Manger, Quality Manager, Production & Development Manager and Analytic Services Manager at PGPI.
A native of Iowa and raised in Minnesota, Mr. Horswell holds a B.S. in Chemistry from Ambassador College in Pasadena, California, attended the University of Southern California, and is an ABD, Ph.D. in Chemistry.
He has attended numerous postgraduate seminars on topics from statistics to experiment design and is a member of the American Chemical Society and the American Society for Quality.
Scientific Management Team
Gregory M. Fahy, Ph.D.
Gregory M. Fahy is the Chief Scientific Officer of 21st Century Medicine. Dr. Fahy prioritizes, develops and directs the company's research activities. He also manages extramural collaborative research projects. Dr Fahy applies his 30+ years of experience in the field of cryobiology and cryopreservation to all research at 21CM.
As a scientist with the American Red Cross, he was the originator of the first practical method of cryopreservation by vitrification and the inventor of computer based systems to apply this technology to whole organs. While at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, he spearheaded the original concept of ice blocking agents. Since joining 21st Century Medicine, he invented tonicity-mediated chilling injury control, the qv* system for predicting the toxicity of complex cryoprotectant solutions for organized tissues, and the DFE series of cryoprotectant solutions upon which our flagship solution, M22, is based, and he discovered the nucleation inhibiting properties of what is now our Supercool Z-1000 product and designed and built much of the equipment that our current research is now based on. He has published 94 papers, given well over 100 invited presentations, and holds 39 issued US and international patents.
Respected for his expertise and contributions to the advancement of both fundamental and applied cryobiology, Dr Fahy has been named as a Fellow of the Society for Cryobiology and was recently made the President Elect of the Society.
A native of California, Dr. Fahy holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from the University of California at Irvine and a Ph.D. from the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.
Brian G. Wowk, Ph.D.
Brian G. Wowk is the Chief Technology Officer of 21st Century Medicine responsible for developing a variety of cryobiological technologies. He was the discoverer of the ice-blocking properties of what is now our Supercool X-1000 product and was able to define the antinucleation properties of our Supercool Z-1000 product and demonstrate the synergistic effects of these two ice blockers. He is the co-inventor of M22 and the inventor of our CIVS technology for storing samples at temperatures between the glass transition temperature and typical liquid nitrogen vapor storage temperatures. He is presently refining electromagnetic warming methods for vitrified whole organs.
Dr Wowk came to the company from the National Research Council of Canada where he studied magnetic resonance imaging of human brain function. He was previously a graduate student in medical physics at the Manitoba Cancer Treatment and Research Foundation (now CancerCare Manitoba) under the auspices of the University of Manitoba.
Dr. Wowk, now a U.S. citizen, is a native of Winnipeg, Canada and has earned B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Manitoba. He has published many peer-reviewed articles on vitrification, cryopreservation, and medical physics topics, six book chapters, and holds several patents. Dr Wowk has spoken on cryobiology and biophysics related topics at numerous national and international scientific meetings.
Ralf H. Spindler, Ph.D.
Ralf H. Spindler is 21CM's Head of Neural Systems Cryopreservation. Dr. Spindler is a cryobiologist, engineer, and, as a Principal Investigator at 21CM, responsible for various projects related to the preservation of neural ultrastructure and viability.
Dr. Spindler worked in industry and in academia before coming to 21CM. At the R&D department of Cook Medical in Bloomington, Indiana, he developed various next generation medical devices. At Philips AG, Zurich, Switzerland, he created circuits for mixed signal microchips. He held multiple postdoctoral research positions in the field of cryobiology, including the University of Minnesota, investigating long-term cryogenic storage of hematopoietic stem cells and at the University of Hannover, Germany where he researched the cellular toxicity of cryoprotective agents. Dr. Spindler has also worked as a postdoc in the neuroscience field at the Department of Pharmacology, University of Minnesota. There, he was investigating effects of drugs on the synaptic loss and recovery of primary neuronal cell cultures after creating novel high throughput laser scanning microscopic setups.
Dr. Spindler was born in Germany. He received a Diplom-Ingenieur in electrical engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, a Master of Science in biomedical engineering from RWTH Aachen University, and completed a Doktor-Ingenieur from the University of Hannover, Germany in the field of cryopreservation (accredited as Ph.D. by Foreign Credential Evaluations, www.ece.org). He has published many peer-reviewed articles on cryopreservation and given many national and international presentations at scientific conferences. He holds numerous patents in the fields of biomedical engineering and cryopreservation.
