Leadership

Xiling Shen, PhD
Xiling Shen, PhD
Founder, Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Shen is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xilis. He has 13 years of industrial and academic experience as a design engineer and faculty member at Cornell University and Duke University. His work focuses on combining engineering, computational and biological techniques to study patient models of cancer and precision medicine. Dr. Shen is currently the Hawkins Family Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke, the Director of the Woo Center for Big Data and Precision Health (DAP) and a core member of the Center for Genomics and Computational Biology (GCB). He received his BS, MS, and PhD from Stanford University.

David Hsu, MD, PhD
David Hsu, MD, PhD
Founder

Dr. Hsu is co-founder of Xilis. He is a medical oncologist and is currently Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Hsu’s clinical interests include gastrointestinal malignancies and colorectal cancer. His lab focuses on using patient models of cancer, high-throughput genomic and proteomic technologies to develop new therapies and diagnostics for cancer. He received his MD and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed his medical training at UT Southwestern Medical Center and Duke Medical Center.

Stan Skrzypczak, MS, MBA
Stan Skrzypczak, MS, MBA
Chief Commercial Officer (Acting)

Mr. Skrzypczak is Acting Chief Commercial Officer of Xilis and has more than 30 years of experience working in corporate and business development as well as leading startups towards a global footprint while increasing shareholder value or building toward an IPO. He was previously VP, Corporate Development and Reimbursement at Guardant Health and VP, Business Development at Invitae. Mr. Skrzypczak also held senior commercial roles at Genomic Health and Genentech. He received his BA in Biochemistry from the University of Rochester, MS in Microbiology and Immunology from Wright State University, and MBA from Xavier University.

Elena Helman, PhD
Elena Helman, PhD
VP, Data Science and Bioinformatics

Dr. Helman is Vice President of Data Science and Bioinformatics at Xilis. She has over 10 years experience in the cancer genomics and diagnostic space, bringing together data analytics and computational tools with a deep knowledge of cancer biology. She has developed diagnostic products across the regulatory landscape, led algorithm design, and biopharma partnerships. Dr Helman was previously Director of Bioinformatics at Guardant Health. She received her PhD in Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

Thomas Duke, PhD, JD
Thomas Duke, PhD, JD
General Counsel & Head of Intellectual Property

Dr. Duke is General Counsel & Head of Intellectual Property at Xilis. He has extensive experience as outside counsel, in-house attorney, and board member, guiding legal and intellectual property strategy for life sciences companies ranging from startups to multi-billion-dollar pharma companies. Dr. Duke received his B.S. in Microbiology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, his Ph.D. in Molecular Biochemistry and Biophysics from Illinois Institute of Technology, and his J.D. from Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

Steven Metzger
Steven Metzger
VP, Diagnostics

Steven Metzger is an experienced diagnostic product developer and VP of Diagnostics.

Steven previously founded and led product development at Accelerate Diagnostics focused on bacteremia and fungemia where he drove, from inception, the company’s flagship platform through the De Novo 510K process receiving clearance by FDA and registration in EMEA markets. Since the Pheno®system launch, a new rapid testing market has been established, reducing time to result from days to hours driving proper treatment selection in at-risk sepsis patients. He also led early stage product development of automated stand alone Arc™ sample preparation and the next generation Pheno®II product lines.

Steven is passionate about developing medical and diagnostic devices that create new markets with substantial clinical benefit to patients and corresponding pricing power. He is motivated by the opportunity to impact cancer biology through commercialization of the xilis MicroOrganoSphere™(MOS) technology revolutionizing cancer diagnostics with significant therapeutic applications.