About Us

Management

Management

Nazli Azimi Pharm.D., Ph.D., Founder and CEO

Dr. Nazli Azimi is the Founder and CEO of Bioniz, an emerging bio-pharmaceutical company located in Irvine CA. Dr. Azimi is the co-inventor of Bioniz platform technology, a novel and transformative approach for development of targeted therapeutics for immune diseases. This technology promises an entire new class of therapeutics with superior efficacy, lower toxicity, and lower cost than the current therapeutics in the market.

Prior to Bioniz, Dr. Azimi was a research scientist at the prestigious National Institutes of Health (NIH) for over 10 years where she made seminal contribution to the discovery and understanding of an immune related protein called interleukin-15. Dr. Azimi is the author of several peer-reviewed publications and has won awards and recognition in the scientific community. She holds several patents in the US and abroad. Dr Azimi is also a trained artist. She had several art exhibitions of her paintings in the Washington DC area. Dr. Azimi is a graduate of University of Tehran and University of Maryland and completed her post-doctoral training at the NIH.


Dr. Yutaka Tagaya, MD, Ph.D., Chief Science Officer

Dr. Tagaya graduated from the Kyoto University Medical School in 1986. He then enrolled in the graduate-school to pursue research career in the field of molecular immunology. His early accomplishments include the molecular cloning of an ATL-derived factor, a cytokine that bears redox-controlling activity as a mammalian homolog of a bacterial enzyme thioredoxin. Dr. Tagaya then received his post-doctoral training in Dr. Kimishige Ishizaka’s group at the La Jolla Institute of Allergy and Immunology, where Dr. Tagaya successfully integrated the elements of cellular immunology and animal research into his original training in the field of molecular biology and biochemistry. Later, he joined the Metabolism Branch of the National Cancer Institute (Dr. Thomas Waldmann. Branch Chief).

While at the NCI, Dr. Tagaya has made seminal discoveries in the field of cytokine biology, in particular about those, which utilize a common receptor called common-gamma (IL-2, -4, -7, -9, -15, and -21). He has been asked to write reviews on this subject in prestigious journals and has been recognized as one of the international leaders in this field. Furthermore, Dr. Tagaya has generated animal models to study the biology of cytokines and through his work has demonstrated a direct correlation between cytokines and some diseases such as cancer and autoimmune diseases. These animal models are of great value, since they provide models for testing therapeutic molecules.

In 2009, Dr. Tagaya joined his long time friend Dr. Azimi to act as the Chief Scientific Officer of Bioniz, LLC. With his deep and diverse expertise in biochemistry, molecular biology, cellular signaling, and microarray-based bioinformatics, Dr. Tagaya is now trying to develop novel antagonists using small peptide technology against the gc-family cytokines. Such peptides could efficiently inhibit the cytokine action in vivo to cure inflammatory and autoimmune diseases in a much more flexible way than anti-cytokine antibodies. Similarly a small molecule agonistic cytokine peptide could prove more efficient than the entire cytokine in enhancing potent adjuvant activity upon immunization and anti-cancer therapeutics. Dr. Tagaya is also interested in applying the small peptide strategy in manipulating nuclear and epigenetic events upon cellular reprogramming and tissue regeneration in wound healing.

Margaret (Peggy) Marino, Ph.D., VP of Business Development

Dr. Marino is a global, strategic partnering expert with 25 years of R&D; experience in the pharmaceutical industry across multiple therapeutic areas. Most recently, Peggy held a Senior Director position in the Pfizer External R&D; Innovation group where, in a business development role, she executed external search and evaluation strategies to identify innovative preclinical and clinical biotherapeutics and enabling technology platforms and established collaborative agreements with multiple biotechs and academic institutions. Previously, Dr. Marino was the Site Lead for the Pfizer St. Louis laboratories for the External Research Solutions group supporting the Inflammation, Biotherapeutics and Medicinal Chemistry research units where she was instrumental in establishing the business and research development process for external collaborations in US, Europe and Asia to further strengthen and expand the competitive advantage of Pfizer’s R&D; portfolio.

Prior to joining Pfizer in 2003, Dr. Marino held Sr. Director level positions in Pharmacia, Searle Pharmaceuticals and Monsanto where she led preclinical research groups in areas such as genomics, biotechnology, molecular/protein engineering, structural/analytical chemistry, highthroughput in vitro screening and pharmacology - driving target validation to numerous clinical drug candidate NCEs and NBEs most notably, Celebrex®, Bextra®, and Genotropin®.

Dr. Marino received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Hershey Medical Center of Pennsylvania State University and went on to complete postdoctoral studies in gene regulation prior to joining the pharmaceutical industry. Peggy is passionate in her pursuit of differentiated medicines which address unmet medical needs and developing innovative internal/external research partnerships to accomplish that goal.