Arizona Tribune - Revalia Bio Taps Former Lilly and Verily Exec to Lead Next Growth Phase

NEW HAVEN, CT / ACCESS Newswire / September 16, 2026 / Revalia Bio (Revalia), which generates novel drug development data using functioning donated human organs, today announced the appointment of Casimir Starsiak III (Caz) as President and Chief Executive Officer, with co-founder Greg Tietjen, Ph.D., stepping into the role of Chief Innovation Officer. Starsiak will lead commercial expansion efforts, pharmaceutical partnerships, and operational scale up as the company builds on initial platform data. Tietjen will drive the integration of the company's research, core technology, and product development.

AI-driven discovery is accelerating the search for promising drug candidates, but many models still rely on animal studies, cell cultures, and historical clinical trial data that cannot fully capture how a therapy behaves in a functioning human organ. Revalia provides that missing layer through its perfusion technology, which keeps donated organs viable outside the body under clinically relevant conditions.

The organs are obtained through organ procurement organizations with donor family consent and used for research only after being deemed unsuitable for transplant, ensuring research never competes with patient care. It reflects a new paradigm that transforms the loss of one patient into the future of human-centered development, a model grounded in real human data rather than approximations. By measuring how a therapy distributes, acts, and affects human tissue before it enters clinical trials, Revalia's Human Data Stack generates evidence that informs critical development decisions while giving discovery and AI models human data for training and validation.

The company is entering its next growth phase that requires additional resources to strengthen commercial execution and operational infrastructure, while deepening the use of human data as a New Approach Methodology (NAM) in drug development. Together with Revalia's founding team, Greg has helped successfully bring the company to its current state of maturity-closing key fundraising rounds, securing the prestigious ARPA-H Catalyst award, and architecting the vision for the company's integrated technology and data platform. Starsiak brings deep experience at the intersection of technology and life sciences to elevate the business from this strong scientific foundation.

"The real opportunity is not simply to produce another dataset," said Starsiak. "What drew me here was the chance to turn extraordinary science into infrastructure the industry can use at scale. My priority is to make data generated from functioning human organs an integral part of how pharmaceutical companies develop medicines."

Starsiak joins from Eli Lilly and Company, where he served as Associate Vice President, Enterprise AI and Research Software Product Management. During his tenure, he built and led teams responsible for custom software supporting drug discovery and clinical trials. His work also included AI products and agents now used across Lilly, helping drive the technological transformation of the 150-year-old pharmaceutical company.

Previously, Starsiak served as Senior Vice President of Product and Operations at Genalyte. He also spent more than six years at Verily, Alphabet's life sciences company, where he established and led Strategy and Business Operations and served as General Manager of the Baseline clinical trials platform. Earlier, on Google's Strategy team, he helped launch Google Cloud Genomics and supported the initial business planning for the life sciences effort that became Verily.

As the first Chief Innovation Officer, Tietjen is eager to unite the company's advances in science, hardware, software, and AI into a fully integrated platform for generating and applying human organ data. He will remain a core visionary, helping establish the company as a technically rigorous, pioneering leader in innovation.

"Building this dynamic organization has meant taking an idea from the lab and developing the team and infrastructure to put it into practice," said Tietjen. "Caz brings deep experience to grow our reach within the pharmaceutical industry while I devote more attention to propelling the platform's scientific and technical development. Together, we can expand what researchers learn from each donated organ and help more development teams benefit from those insights."

Starsiak and Tietjen will work alongside co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Jenna DiRito, Ph.D., to expand research capacity as Revalia grows its pharmaceutical relationships.

"Revalia Bio has reached an important inflection point," said Brian Wilcove, a member of Revalia's board and Managing Partner at America's Frontier Fund. "It now has the opportunity to turn years of scientific and technical progress into a platform with broad industry impact. Caz knows how to build and scale complex healthcare technology organizations, while Greg has the vision and expertise to keep the company at the forefront of innovation. Their complementary strengths give the company the leadership it needs for this next stage."

For more information, visit revaliabio.com.

ABOUT REVALIA BIO:

Revalia Bio is transforming how new medicines are developed by offering on-demand access to real, functional human data. Built on decades of research in human organ perfusion, Revalia Bio's human organ research platform enables rigorous testing in donated organs maintained under clinical conditions. This makes it possible to run studies that generate trial-quality data on safety, efficacy, and mechanism at any stage of development, before a molecule ever reaches a patient. For more information, visit www.revaliabio.com.

MEDIA CONTACT: Nina Pfister, MAG PR at E: [email protected]

SOURCE: Revalia Bio

View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire

A.Ruiz--AT