Advisory Group

Tom Parr, PhD, has more than 35 years drug discovery experience across both large pharmaceutical and small biotechnology companies. Prior to joining Spero, Dr. Parr was the Chief Scientific Officer at Fedora Pharmaceuticals where the company moved novel diazabicyclooctane beta-lacramase inhibitors toward development partnerships. Prior to Fedora he was the Chief Scientific Officer at Targanta Therapeutics, now part of The Medicines Company. While at Targanta, Dr. Parr was instrumental in progressing the lipoglycopeptide, oritavancin through Phase 3 trials to registration with the FDA. Dr. Parr has worked on a broad range of marketed antibiotics including beta-lactams (cefaclor, loracarbef, cefuroxime axetil, cephalexin, moxalactam, ceftazidime, cefazolin, RWJ-333441); glycopeptides (vancomycin and oritavancin); lipodepsipeptides (daptomycin); aminoglycosides (tobramycin); quinolones (cinoxacin); macrolides (dirythromycin); antimicrobial peptides (iseganins); and a variety of additional developmental candidates.

Dr. Parr earned his PhD from the University of Calgary and conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia. He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Biochemistry at the University of Ottawa before beginning his drug discovery and development career.

Dr. Kreiswirth is a Member of the Center for Discovery and Innovation at Hackensack Meridian Health, an adjunct faculty member of the Department of Medicine at New York University, a lecturer at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, and a visiting professor at the Museum of Natural History.  Dr Kreiswirth earned his Ph.D. in Microbiology characterizing the genetic basis of the S. aureus toxic shock syndrome toxin.

His career as a molecular epidemiologist spanned 41 years at the Public Health Research Institute where he focused on understanding the spread of antibiotic resistant bacterial pathogens in hospitals and in the community. His laboratory has developed rapid diagnostic tools and the experience to track the spread of hospital infections and their implementation of spa typing to genotype methicillin resistant S. aureus (MRSA) and investigate nosocomial outbreaks has become the gold standard to support hospital infection control efforts. The laboratory’s experience advancing public health programs led to the creation of the Tuberculosis Center to study the molecular epidemiology of TB and to work closely with the CDC and the Health Departments of NYC and New Jersey to control the spread of tuberculosis The center characterized the highly multidrug resistant strain W and created the largest M. tuberculosis strain and DNA fingerprint library in the US. The laboratory has extended their public health experience to work with local hospitals to respond to the emergence of carbapenem resistant Enterobacteriaceae, multidrug resistant M. abscessus infections and to use whole genome sequencing to unravel their epidemiology. 

Dr. Kreiswirth has over 480 peer review publications, is an editor and reviewer of numerous infectious disease journals and has appeared in National Geographic and on 60 minutes.

Alex Horsley is a Professor of Respiratory Medicine at the University of Manchester, consultant at the Manchester Adult Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Centre, and CF academic lead for the NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre. He is chair of CF Trust Clinical Trials Accelerator Platform, director of the NIHR Manchester Clinical Research Facility at Wythenshawe Hospital, and chair of the NIHR Respiratory Translational Research Collaboration. 

Alex has led >25 trials of new therapies since 2012 and been national or global lead on trials of several new CF therapies, including transformative CFTR modulator drugs. He has experience of study design and delivery at all phases of clinical trials, principally in CF but more recently also in acute COVID. His academic work encompasses lung physiology and imaging (as clinical and trial outcomes), and lung infection in CF (fungal and bacterial). 

Thomas Gorsuch is a respiratory physician in Manchester. He is a specialist in tuberculosis and non-tuberculous mycobacterial infection and has an interest in respiratory infections in immunocompromised people and respiratory complications of stem cell transplantation. He is one of very few Respiratory physicians in the UK with the Diploma in HIV Medicine. He trained in Cambridge, London, Manchester and with Professor Peter Ormerod in Lancashire, and worked in Hlabisa Hospital in South Africa. 

His research interests are TB diagnosis, treatment and service delivery. He has recently been an investigator for several therapeutic trials for COVID-19 and TRiBE (a study assessing value of Xpert Ultra in bronchoscopy and EBUS) and is a co-applicant on TB-DILI (an NIHR-funded RCT of TB therapy following treatment interruption due to drug-induced liver injury).