
James D. McChesney
President (1986-1987), Fellow (2016)
Cloaked Therapeutics, LLC
Jim McChesney received a B.S. (Iowa State University), and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana
University. He became Prof. of Botany and Medicinal Chemistry at Univ. Kansas (1975), and
moved to Univ. Mississippi (1977), chairing the Dept. of Pharmacognosy (1978-1986), and
teaching in Brazil as a Fulbright Fellow (1985). While Director of the
Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (1986-1995), he conceived
and implemented the establishment of the National Center for Natural
Products Research (1989), and was named F.A.P. Barnard Distinguished
Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences (1993). In 1996 he became V.P.
R&D at NaPro Biotherapeutics, renamed Tapestry Pharmaceuticals (2003)
with the sale of its development group to ChromaDex, Boulder, CO. He
became CSO of the latter group while remaining CSO at Tapestry. His
research interests include the chemistry, metabolism, function and production of bioactive
natural products, chemotherapy of tropical diseases, and the control of plant growth and
development. His current focus is development of cancer chemo-therapeutics. His achievements
include: development of Ironstone Separations, a new technology for the separation and
purification of natural product drug candidates; a strategy for economical production of
paclitaxel from cultivated Taxus biomass; design of pharmaceutically improved taxanes,
including, TPI 287, currently in Phase II clinical trials; discovery of a new 8-aminoquinoline
analog, NPC 1161, having lower toxicity and broad anti-parasitic activity, and expected to enter
clinical trials. An advisor to the WHO and UNESCO, and an elected Fellow of the AAAS
(1995), he has received numerous awards and over $40 million funding (NIH, NSF, FDA,
USDA, WHO), and has authored nearly 200 publications and over 40 patents. (JDM)