Pillar Biosciences Expands Leadership Team with Appointment of Daniel Harma as Chief Commercial Officer and Christa Adkins as General Counsel

NATICK, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Pillar Biosciences, an innovative, next-generation sequencing (NGS) solutions, in-vitro diagnostics (IVD) company, today announced the appointment of Daniel Harma, M.B.A., as Chief Commercial Officer and Christa Adkins, J.D., as General Counsel. Both executives join Pillar Biosciences with more than 20 years of experience in their respective fields.

"We are thrilled to welcome Dan and Christa to the Pillar team at this critical point in the company’s growth,” said Randy Pritchard, CEO of Pillar Biosciences. “As accomplished leaders with demonstrated successes, their respective expertise will be instrumental as we continue to expand our commercial presence and evolve our company’s strategy. Together, they bring important insights to Pillar’s evolving leadership team, and I’m personally excited for the contributions that they’ll individually make in growing awareness of our NGS tests’ value proposition and supporting critical company growth initiatives.”

Mr. Harma has more than 30 years of experience in the medical device industry, notably in in-vitro diagnostics, molecular diagnostics, and hematology markets. Prior to joining Pillar Biosciences, he served as Chief Commercial Officer at NeuMoDx^TM where he led the commercial team and assisted in transitioning the business from research and development stage to full commercialization. Previously, he held multiple roles at Abbott Laboratories, Inc., in both the Diagnostics and Molecular divisions. His positions included oversight of product marketing, sales leadership, and commercial development. Mr. Harma received his M.B.A. from Loyola University and his B.B.A. in Marketing from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Ms. Adkins has more than 20 years of experience as internal counsel to multi-national corporations and early-stage companies. Prior to joining Pillar Biosciences, she served as General Counsel, Corporate Secretary, and Member of the Equity Incentive Plan Committee at Vibenomics, Inc. Previously, she spent more than 10 years at Roche Diagnostic Corporation, as Commercial Lawyer and Director of Ethics and Compliance. She also has extensive nonprofit board leadership experience and is currently the Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Nature Conservancy of Indiana, Trustee for the Indianapolis Zoological Society, and Trustee for the Orchard School. Ms. Adkins holds a J.D. from Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law and a B.S. in Economics from Purdue University.

About Pillar Biosciences

Pillar Biosciences is a global oncology solutions company delivering in-vitro diagnostics (IVD) that provide accurate, robust, timely, clinically actionable insights to guide treatment decisions throughout a patient’s continuum of care. We power the oncology ecosystem with our proprietary, automatable, NGS platform agnostic, SLIMamp^® and PiVAT^® technologies with a simplified workflow to expedite the delivery of robust and dependable clinical test results.

Our mission is to enable access to high quality, affordable, specialty NGS testing, performed by any NGS laboratory as clinical grade tests, closer to home, for all patients. Pillar has operations in Natick, MA and Shanghai, China. For more information, visit www.pillar-biosciences.com.