HepQuant Names Chief Operating Officer

HepQuant LLC, a Greenwood Village, Colo.-based company with a patented and patent-pending technology for evaluating the liver in patients with chronic liver disease,has appointed Richard Whitcomb as chief operating officer.
 
HepQuant CEO Dr. Greg Everson stated, “On behalf of HepQuant, I am excited to welcome Rick to the HepQuant team. Rick is a proven executive with a track record of successfully leading, growing and transforming medical diagnostics businesses to achieve higher levels of operational efficiency through strategy development and execution. His skills in international expansion, cross-functional team development and marketing will also serve HepQuant well.”
 
Whitcomb joins HepQuant with more than 20 years of experience in the life sciences and medical diagnostics industries. Most recently, he served as president and CEO at Colorado-based Bioptix Diagnostics where, during his more than 10 years of leadership, he helped the company commercialize core optical technology for pharma and biotech users. Besides building a cross-disciplinary team of physicists, chemists, biochemists and engineers, he established distributor channels in Asia.
 
“My experience in developing Bioptix from its early days through the selling of the company—plus my tenure since then as an entrepreneur in residence with CU Boulder and a SAGE advisor with Innosphere—emboldened my interest in innovative technologies. HepQuant represents breakthrough thinking about liver function testing and a brand new way to look at investigational tools in this area of the medical landscape,” noted Whitcomb. “I look forward to the opportunity to advance and expand HepQuant’s clinical and commercial horizons.”
 
He served in various leadership roles for nearly 20 years with Hewlett Packard Company and its carve-out, Agilent Technologies, an international technology company specializing in test and measurement, and life sciences.
 
Whitcomb earned a master of science degree in finance and econometrics, business administration, from the University of Colorado (Leeds School). He has a bachelor of science degree in economics from the University of Minnesota.
 
HepQuant LLC, is a privately-held, early-stage combination drug and in-vitro diagnostic company. HepQuant’s products are investigational combination drug and in-vitro diagnostic devices and have not yet been evaluated or reviewed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for commercial sale. They are currently available for investigational use via the FDA IDE application process.