— Curing Heart Disease
Advisory Board
The Curing Heart Disease Advisory Board brings together distinguished experts who share our commitment to advancing the understanding, prevention, and treatment of cardiovascular disease. Their experience and insight help inform our mission to provide thoughtful, science-based information that empowers people to make better decisions about their heart health.
Dr. Garry J. Handelman
Dr. Garry J. Handelman was Professor Emeritus of Biomedical and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Zuckerberg College of Health Sciences. He holds a PhD in Biochemistry from Tufts University and a BA in Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Dr. Handelman’s research has focused extensively on nutritional biochemistry, oxidative stress, inflammation, chronic disease, and the biological effects of diet and nutrition. His work has included research involving cardiovascular risk factors, atherosclerosis, dietary fats, antioxidants, lipid oxidation, diabetes, hypertension, and lifestyle-based approaches to disease prevention.
His research career has also included extensive work in chronic kidney disease and dialysis, including the study of oxidative stress, vitamin C, anemia, inflammation, and uremic toxins. He has authored and co-authored numerous peer-reviewed scientific publications and has served as principal investigator on multiple research projects and sponsored studies.
Dr. Handelman brings to the advisory board decades of experience in biochemistry and nutritional science, with particular expertise in the relationship between nutrition, metabolism, inflammation, and chronic disease. His interdisciplinary perspective strengthens the board’s scientific and nutritional expertise and supports its commitment to evidence-based approaches to cardiovascular health and disease prevention.
James Otvos
James (Jim) Otvos earned a PhD in comparative biochemistry from UC Berkeley and completed his postdoctoral training in molecular biophysics at Yale University. He spent 20 years in academia, first on the chemistry faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and then as Professor of Biochemistry at North Carolina State University, during which time he developed new technology for measuring lipoprotein particles using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. He then founded LipoScience, Inc. to enable clinical translation of the NMR blood testing technology and served on the Board of Directors overseeing analytical development and clinical research.
Under his leadership, LipoScience developed the Vantera Clinical Analyzer, a fully automated NMR platform designed for high-throughput lipoprotein subfractionation analysis in clinical laboratories, which subsequently received FDA approval. This device quantifies key metrics in plasma to produce a lipid profile and provide additional information on metabolic health and mortality risk. Following Labcorp’s acquisition of LipoScience in 2014, Dr. Otvos continued to oversee research devoted to development of novel NMR metabolomic assays addressing cardiovascular, diabetes, and inflammatory risk.
He left Labcorp in 2022 but maintains active clinical research collaborations with academic, government, and industrial investigators. This includes academic affiliations with NC State University (Adjunct Professor of Molecular and Structural Biochemistry) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Adjunct Professor of Medicine). He has coauthored over 250 scientific publications and is a named inventor on over 15 patents.
Dr. Otvos’s recent work has focused on translating the rich data hidden in a single NMR spectrum into multimarker scores that predict insulin resistance (LP-IR), diabetes risk (DRI), systemic inflammation (GlycA), and short-term all-cause mortality (the Metabolic Vulnerability Index, or MVX). [CardioPharma, Inc. e Grokipedia]
