GbS Global Biopharma, Inc., Gb Sciences wholly-owned Canadian subsidiary
GBS Global Biopharma, Inc., the wholly-owned Canadian subsidiary of GB Sciences, Inc., is a phytomedicine research and biopharmaceutical development company located in Ottawa, Canada. GBS Global Biopharma’s proprietary drug discovery platform generates plant-inspired, optimized therapeutic mixtures for a variety of medical indications. The company currently has Rx programs in late preclinical and their lead program in Parkinson’s disease is being advanced towards the clinic. The company is working with time released nanoparticles and rapid dissolve technology for effective oral delivery of their pain and Parkinson’s disease formulations, respectively.
Executive Team of GbS Global Biopharma, Inc.
MICHAEL FARLEY, PHD
President and Board Member of
GBS
Global Biopharma, Inc.
Dr. Michael Farley has extensive experience in the biomedical field as a corporate advisor, manager, and an investor.
Andrea Small-Howard, PhD, MBA
Chief Science Officer &
Board Member
Dr. Andrea Small-Howard has more than 20 years of scientific research experience; as well as executive experience in the biopharmaceutical industry supervising research & development, manufacturing, and quality control divisions in the US and China.
Zach Swarts
Chief Financial Officer
Zach Swarts began his career as an auditor in the Las Vegas office of Ernst & Young, LLP. Mr. Swarts’ clients consisted primarily of SEC-registered companies in the highly regulated gaming industry in Nevada.
Board of Directors for GbS Global Biopharma, Inc.
John Claybron Poss
CEO & Chairman of the Board
Mr. Poss has over 30 years of experience working as a consultant to companies facing major transitions and transformations.
Andrea Small-Howard, PhD, MBA
Chief Science Officer
& Board Member
Dr. Andrea Small-Howard has more than 20 years of scientific research experience; as well as executive experience in the biopharmaceutical industry supervising research & development, manufacturing, and quality control divisions in the US and China.
MICHAEL FARLEY, PHD
President and Board Member of
GBS
Global Biopharma, Inc.
Dr. Michael Farley has extensive experience in the biomedical field as a corporate advisor, manager, and an investor.
John Clayborn Poss
CEO & Chairman of the Board
Mr. Poss has over 30 years of experience working as a consultant to companies facing major transitions and transformations.
Mr. Poss began his career in the Washington, D.C. office of Arthur Andersen & Co. and has served as Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Technology Officer of both public and private companies in such diverse industries as homebuilding, mining, telecommunications, manufacturing, logistics, construction lending and mortgage banking.
For the past twenty months prior to joining GB Sciences, Mr. Poss served as Chief Executive Officer of Experiential Teaching Online Corp., an educational content developer and for four years prior thereto owned and operated his own consulting firm.
Mr. Poss has also worked extensively internationally, successfully negotiating agreements in countries throughout Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Mr. Poss graduated from the University of Texas in 1974 with a degree in accounting. In addition to serving as a director of Fourth Coast Mobility and the Homecare Foundation, he is a director of The Life Raft Group, a non-profit organization that provides patient support and funds research to find a cure for GIST, a rare cancer
Andrea Small-Howard, PhD, MBA
Chief Science Officer & Board Member
Dr. Andrea Small-Howard has more than 20 years of scientific research experience; as well as executive experience in the biopharmaceutical industry supervising research and development, manufacturing, and quality control divisions in both the US and China. Dr. Small-Howard has taken novel biological products from ideation through commercialization.
Dr. Small-Howard has been named an inventor on more than sixty patent applications and taken the lead in obtaining regulatory approvals from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“US FDA”) and numerous international regulatory agencies. Currently, Dr. Andrea Small-Howard leverages her broad biopharmaceutical industry knowledge as the Chief Science Officer and member of the Board of Directors at both GB Sciences, Inc. (OTCQB:GBLX), and their wholly-owned Canadian subsidiary, GBS Global Biopharma, Inc. Dr. Small-Howard brings her passion for advancing research on phytochemical compounds to her current roles.
She envisages bringing more phytomedicines to market through an innovative AI-based drug discovery engine and biopharmaceutical drug development program for disease-specific indications. Dr. Small-Howard has worked on cannabinoids for over 20 years, leading a project group dedicated to the study of cannabinoids in the immune system as an NIH-funded post-doctoral fellow. In this work she published one of the earliest studies of cannabinoid impacts on pro-inflammatory immunocytes.
More recently she has contributed to published studies on consumer protection issues surrounding ‘medicinal’ Cannabis chemovars in Nevada, co-authored scholarly reviews on cannabinoids in heart disease and Parkinson’s Disease (PD), co-authored mechanistic studies on cannabinoid and terpene regulation of ion channels, and co-authored an innovative study demonstrating the utility of nanoparticles as delivery vehicles for Cannabis-derived therapeutic compounds.
Dr. Small-Howard is the architect of a strategic vision at GB Sciences/GBS Global Biopharma to make safe, effective, standardized cannabinoid medicines available to patients where its use can be supported with rigorous evidence. To achieve standardization in their cannabinoid-containing, optimized therapeutic mixtures, the Company is using synthetic cannabinoids produced under current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP), which are identical in both structure and function to the homologous plant cannabinoids
Dr. Andrea L. Small-Howard
Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board, Chief Science Officer and Director of GB Sciences/GBS Global Biopharma, Inc.
Dr. Andrea Small-Howard has more than 20 years of scientific research experience; as well as executive experience in the biopharmaceutical industry supervising research and development, manufacturing, and quality control divisions in both the US and China. Dr. Small-Howard has taken novel biological products from ideation through commercialization.
Dr. Small-Howard has been named an inventor on more than sixty patent applications and taken the lead in obtaining regulatory approvals from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“US FDA”) and numerous international regulatory agencies. Currently, Dr. Andrea Small-Howard leverages her broad biopharmaceutical industry knowledge as the Chief Science Officer and member of the Board of Directors at both GB Sciences, Inc. (OTCQB:GBLX), and their wholly-owned Canadian subsidiary, GBS Global Biopharma, Inc. Dr. Small-Howard brings her passion for advancing research on phytochemical compounds to her current roles.
She envisages bringing more phytomedicines to market through an innovative AI-based drug discovery engine and biopharmaceutical drug development program for disease-specific indications. Dr. Small-Howard has worked on cannabinoids for over 20 years, leading a project group dedicated to the study of cannabinoids in the immune system as an NIH-funded post-doctoral fellow. In this work she published one of the earliest studies of cannabinoid impacts on pro-inflammatory immunocytes.
More recently she has contributed to published studies on consumer protection issues surrounding ‘medicinal’ Cannabis chemovars in Nevada, co-authored scholarly reviews on cannabinoids in heart disease and Parkinson’s Disease (PD), co-authored mechanistic studies on cannabinoid and terpene regulation of ion channels, and co-authored an innovative study demonstrating the utility of nanoparticles as delivery vehicles for Cannabis-derived therapeutic compounds.
Dr. Small-Howard is the architect of a strategic vision at GB Sciences/GBS Global Biopharma to make safe, effective, standardized cannabinoid medicines available to patients where its use can be supported with rigorous evidence. To achieve standardization in their cannabinoid-containing, optimized therapeutic mixtures, the Company is using synthetic cannabinoids produced under current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP), which are identical in both structure and function to the homologous plant cannabinoids
Zach Swarts
Chief Financial Officer
Zach Swarts began his career as an auditor in the Las Vegas office of Ernst & Young, LLP. Mr. Swarts’ clients consisted primarily of SEC-registered companies in the highly regulated gaming industry in Nevada. After his departure from Ernst & Young, Mr. Swarts worked for a local public accounting firm as the Manager of the Litigation Support Department.
Mr. Swarts has now provided forensic accounting, expert witness, business valuation, and consulting services to clients in a wide variety of industries.
Mr. Swarts graduated from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas with a BSBA degree in Accounting. Mr. Swarts is also CPA-licensed in Nevada. In 2017, Mr. Swarts began employment with GB Sciences and served as the Director of Finance and Accounting for the two years prior to his appointment as the Chief Financial Officer in 2019.
Mr. Swarts brings both experience and dedication to his role in managing the finances at GB Sciences and preparing the Company’s audited corporate filings.
Edmond DeFrank
Board Member of GB Sciences
Edmond DeFrank is a registered U.S. Patent Attorney, as well as a brand management and anti-counterfeiting specialist since 1993. Mr. DeFrank has over 25 years’ experience as a computer engineer and patent and trademark attorney in the high technology sector. Mr. DeFrank has written and prosecuted over one thousand trademarks and computer-related patent applications and patents for large high technology companies, educational institutions, and governmental entities. Mr. DeFrank is one of the first patent attorneys in U.S. history to successfully write and prosecute software, e-commerce, and IT business model patents for the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. Mr. DeFrank has protected his clients’ IP by working with state, federal, and foreign governments to combat the importation and sale of counterfeit products violating his clients’ patents and trademarks.
Mr. DeFrank’s past representative clients include Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM, Nintendo, Caltech, NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Motorola, Samsung, AT&T, Applied Materials Semiconductor, UCLA, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman Aerospace, Seagate Technology, and Quest Nutrition.
Mr. DeFrank has worked with “Fortune 100” companies and small start-up companies on trademark brand management and strategic patent counseling, including managing trademarks, brands, and exploiting patent portfolios worth from six figures to billions of dollars through audit, analysis, valuation and licensing; performing due diligence for intellectual property acquisition, licensing, prosecution and litigation; managing, structuring and negotiating relationships between high tech companies, including forming licensing opportunities to generate revenue from intellectual property; negotiating and creating complex licensing, outsourcing, software development, manufacturing, marketing and distribution agreements; and performing due diligence and managing all intellectual property aspects of multi-milliondollar mergers and acquisitions.
Mr. DeFrank has extensive entrepreneurial, business development, software development and product development experience, including foreign outsourcing. Mr. DeFrank has founded, operated, and successfully sold several product and software companies. Mr. DeFrank is a named inventor on 5 issued patents and over 30 pending patents.
Dr. Helen Turner
VP Innovation, Professor of Natural Sciences & Mathematics at Chaminade University
Helen Turner is Vice President of Innovation and a Professor in the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at Chaminade University in Honolulu, Hawaii. She is a tenured Professor of Biology at Chaminade, and holds an affiliate Professorship at the University of Hawaii School of Medicine.
Dr. Turner moved to the U.S. in 1998 from her native England. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of London she carried out post-doctoral work at Harvard medical School as a Wellcome Trust International Prize Travelling Fellow. In 2000, she accepted a position as Associate Director of Research and Professor at The Queen’s Center for Biomedical Research in Honolulu. Here, she built a successful and internationally recognized research laboratory, receiving her first NIH RO1 grant at the age of 30. Her research interests focus upon information transmission in the immune system, specifically on the molecular mechanisms that activate the pro-inflammatory mast cells. She has trained numerous graduate students and post-doctoral fellows for successful careers in academia, industry and science policy. She is a sought-after reviewer of Federal and Foundation grants, and she sits on a number of executive boards for research and training initiatives in the sciences.
Since joining Chaminade in 2007, Dr. Turner has fostered transformational growth in the sciences.
As a Federallydesignated Native Hawaiian serving institution, Chaminade is positioned to lead in undergraduate science education, serving students and community in Hawaii and the Pacific. She has led the $14m renovation of instructional and research laboratories, raised $20m in funding for the initiation of a BSN program, and secured Chaminade’s first major research and programmatic funding from agencies such as NIH, NSF and the Department of Defence. New faculty hires and major instrumentation grants have invigorated the undergraduate experience in sciences, and complete curriculum revision in computational sciences and the biological sciences has been completed. Curriculum and faculty research interests now align around the mechanisms and epidemiology of diseases that disproportionately affect the peoples of the Pacific, allowing the University to envision itself as a center of excellence for training and education in this field.
Dr. Norbert E. Kaminsk
Professor, Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology, MSU
Dr. Norbert E. Kaminski is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology and is the Director of the Institute for Integrative Toxicology, at Michigan State University. Dr. Kaminski’s laboratory has been investigating the molecular mechanisms by which cannabinoids alter immune competence for over 22 years, which began with his laboratory’s discovery of cannabinoid receptor expression within cells of the immune system.
Dr. Kaminski has over 30 years of experience in conducting hypothesis driven investigative research directed at elucidation of the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which drugs and chemicals alter immune competence. These immunopharmacological and immunotoxicological studies have utilized approaches spanning measurements of immune function in vivo, ex vivo and in vitro employing rodent and human primary leukocytes and cell lines. Dr. Kaminski’s laboratory has also had a longstanding focus on elucidation of the molecular mechanisms that are responsible for impairment of B cell function by dioxins. He is the author of over 135 journal articles 25 Book Chapters and Reviews and 245 Abstracts.
Dr. Kaminski joined the Michigan State faculty in 1993. He was also affiliated with the Medical College of Virginia in their Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology from 1985-1999. He received his B.A. in Chemistry in 1978 from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, and his M.S. in Toxicology in 1981 and Ph.D. in Toxicology and Physiology in 1985 from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina
Dr. Kaminski has served on a number of advisory panels including National Academy of Science/IOM Review of the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides, 1992-1994; US EPA Science Advisor Board-Dioxin Reassessment Review, 1995; National Academy of Sciences IOM Study on the Assessment of the Health Implications of Exposure to Dioxins, National Academy of Sciences Study on the Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids, and is presently on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Emerging Science on Environmental Health. Dr. Kaminski was a member of the Board of Trustees: International Life Sciences Institute-Health and Environmental Sciences Institute 2003-2012.
Dr. Kaminski has also served on a number of peer review panels including US EPA Science Review Panel for Health Research, 1990-92 and NIH ALTX-4 Study Section as a regular member from 1998-03; as an ad hoc member for NIDA, NIEHS, NIOSH, and Wellcome Trust. Dr. Kaminski served as a member of the National Advisory Environmental Health Sciences Council, Division of Extramural Research and Training for NIEHS. Dr. Kaminski served as Treasurer for the Society of Toxicology from 2005-2007. Dr. Kaminski served as the President for the Society of Toxicology from 2014- 2015.
Dr. Carlos F. Rios-Bedoya
Corporate Director of Scholarly Inquiry at McLaren Health
Dr. Carlos F. Rios-Bedoya is the Corporate Director of Scholarly Inquiry at McLaren Health overseeing research across 13 health care facilities with over 30 residency programs in Michigan.
Dr. Ríos-Bedoya has been a principal investigator and co-investigator in several highly competitive federal (CDC), state (Michigan Department of Community Health), and private (Pfizer, Gilead, and Boehringer-Ingelheim) funded grants in the areas of HCV, drug use epidemiology, clinical trials, mental health, and mobile technology. Dr. Rios-Bedoya has an extensive publication record in peer-reviewed journals on the field of legal and illegal drug use on topics such as HCV/HIV, statistical methods, use of mobile technology, and differences across Hispanic groups.
Dr. Carlos F. Ríos-Bedoya graduated in 1986 from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, with a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree majoring in biology. In 1987, he finished a Masters in Public Health (M.P.H.) with a concentration in epidemiology also from the University of Puerto, Medical Sciences Campus, and in 1999 he completed his doctoral training (Sc.D.) in Psychiatric Epidemiology with a minor in biostatistics from The Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. He did a three-year post-doctoral training (2004-2007) as a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) fellow on the quantitative aspects of drug dependence epidemiology from The Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. He has been a faculty member of the Ponce School of Medicine (1994-2004), the San Juan Bautista School of Medicine (2012-2014), and the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University (2007- 2015).
Dr. Ríos-Bedoya has been invited to present his research at national and international meetings. He currently serves as grant reviewer for the Florida Department of Health’s Multi-Disciplinary, Multi-Institutional and Community-Based (MMC) Grants Program and for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHA). He is also a reviewer for several of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in drug use research (e.g., Nicotine and Tobacco Research, Addiction, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, Addiction Medicine, and American Journal of Preventive Medicine).
Dr. Zoltan Mari
Director of the Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders Program and The Ruvo Family Chair, Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, NV
Dr. Zoltan Mari graduated first in his medical school class in Hungary before completing a post-doctoral fellowship in SUNY Downstate (Brooklyn, NY) on Parkinson disease (PD) animal models and electrophysiology. He finished his neurology residency training in the same institution, where he also served as Chief Resident and was elected to the prestigious Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society.
After his clinical fellowships in both movement disorders and clinical neurophysiology at NIH, he joined Johns Hopkins University faculty, where he was later promoted to Associate Professor and served as Director of the PD & Movement Disorder Division and Center, which has grown markedly under his leadership, including many successful hires and establishing a DBS Center and a clinical fellowship program.
After 11 years at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Mari joined the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, NV in May 2017, where he is the Director of the PD and Movement Disorders Program and serves as The Ruvo Family Chair. Dr. Mari is a renowned expert of PD and movement disorders clinical research and the endowment funds will enable him to study novel remote monitoring technologies, biomarkers, and disease modification.
Dr. Mari has published 70 peer-reviewed papers, authored multiple book chapters, and founded and directed many nationally recognized CME programs. He is a co-founder of Neuraly, Inc. which is developing a revolutionary disease modifying treatment for PD and coauthor on a patent regarding the use of transcranial direct current stimulation in PD.
Dr. Alexander Stokes
Assoc. Professor at the University of Hawaii in the John A Burns School of Medicine’s Center for Cardiovascular Research, Founder, Makai Biotechnology, LLC
Dr. Alexander Stokes has an impeccable pedigree from a twenty-five career in research and development. Dr. Stokes has an excellent track record of cutting-edge research that was established at world-class European and U.S. institutions including Genzyme, Britain’s Imperial Cancer Research Fund, and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Stokes has published in leading journals such as Nature, and Dr, Stokes has been competitively funded through NIH for the past decade. His early career mentors were under millennium Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Paul Nurse, and Harvard Professor, Dr. Jean-Pierre Kinet, founder of Synta Pharmaceuticals and AB Sciences S.A. Together with graduate degrees in Bioengineering, International Biotechnology, and a PhD in Molecular Physiology, this training positioned him to integrate academic science with real-world translational therapeutic goals.
In 2000, Dr. Stokes was recruited as one of the founding scientists for a new ion channel-focused research institute in Hawaii (the Queen’s Center for Biomedical Research), and his work helped this institute grow an impressive portfolio of high-profile papers in TRP channel biology, major NIH funding and intellectual property and subsequent licensing. Recruited to the Cardiovascular Center of Excellence at the University of Hawaii in 2007, Dr. Stokes recognized that leveraging the tremendous pharmaceutical potential of TRP channels relied on the development of sophisticated in vivo models for their role in human pathology, and this highly translational pre-clinical work dominated his research agenda for next 7 years. His approaches and findings transformed TRVP1 from a minor target in analgesia to a major player in the billion-dollar cardiovascular market space and offers real hope to millions of patients afflicted by heart failure. This intellectual property is the basis for Makai Biotechnology, LLC.
Dr. Michael Farley
President and Board Member of GBS Global Biopharma, Inc
Dr. Michael Farley has a extensive experience in the biomedical field as a corporate advisor, manager, and an investor. Dr. Farley advised on $US 150 M in venture financings and business development transactions for life science companies in international markets. Michael led the Investment Canada review of the Connaught Biosciences-Pasteur Merieux merger, the largest Pharma transaction pre-2000. Michael founded a natural food company (exited 2002) and he is a Director of a wine production/distribution company in California. Michael holds a PhD in the Philosophy of Science from the Université de Montréal.
Scientific Advisory Board
ANDREA SMALL-HOWARD, PHD, MBA
Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board, Chief Science Officer and President of GB Sciences/GBS Global Biopharma
Dr. Andrea Small-Howard has more than 20 years of scientific research experience; as well as executive experience in the biopharmaceutical industry supervising research & development, manufacturing, and quality control divisions in the US and China.
Dr. Helen Turner
VP Innovation, Professor of Natural Sciences & Mathematics at Chaminade University
Helen Turner is Vice President of Innovation and Dean of the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at Chaminade University in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Dr. Norbert E. Kaminski
Professor, Department of Pharmacology
& Toxicology, MSU
Dr. Norbert E. Kaminski is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology and is the Director of the Institute for Integrative Toxicology, at MSU.
Dr. Carlos F. Rios-Bedoya
Corporate Director of Scholarly Inquiry
at McLaren Health
Dr. Carlos is the Corporate Director of Scholarly Inquiry at McLaren Health overseeing research across 13 health care facilities with over 30 residency programs in Michigan.
Dr. Zoltan Mari
Director of the Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders Program and The Ruvo Family Chair, Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, NV
Dr. Zoltan Mari graduated first in his medical school class in Hungary before completing a post-doctoral fellowship in SUNY Downstate (Brooklyn, NY) on Parkinson disease (PD) animal models and electrophysiology.
Dr. Alexander Stokes
Assoc. Professor at the University of Hawaii in the John A Burns School of Medicine’s Center for Cardiovascular Research, Founder, Makai Biotechnology, LLC
Dr. Alex Stokes has an impeccable pedigree from a twenty-five career in research and development. He has an excellent track record of cutting-edge research.
Gb Sciences, Inc. (OTCQB:GBLX)
Gb Sciences, Inc. is a plant-inspired, biopharmaceutical research and development company creating patented, disease-targeted formulations of cannabis- and other plant-inspired therapeutic mixtures for the prescription drug market. The ‘plant-inspired’ active ingredients in its therapeutic mixtures are synthetic homologues identical to the original plant compounds but produced under current Good Manufacturing Practices. Gb Sciences’ intellectual property portfolio contains six issued U.S. and three issued foreign patents, as well as 17 U.S. and 51 foreign patent-pending applications. In its drug development pipeline, Gb Sciences has five preclinical phase product development programs. Gb Sciences’ lead program for Parkinson’s disease is being prepared for a first-in-human trial.
