TV personality Dr. Oz is now on the board of a biotech company – STAT

One biotech companys newest director has a very familiar face. Dr. Mehmet Oz will be joining the board of directors of PanTheryx, a Colorado-based nutraceutical and biologics company, the company recently announced.

Oz, the host of The Dr. Oz Show, commands a huge following. He has also drawn sharp criticism for his embrace of alternative medicine and for his disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine, as 10 physicians wrote in a 2015 letter to the dean of medicine at Columbia University, where Oz is a faculty member.

Its unclear whether Oz has served on the board of a biotech company previously. He served on the American Association for Thoracic Surgerys board and the board of nonprofit HealthCorps; he is also named as a co-founder of several health companies, including SleepScore Labs and Sharecare.

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Representatives for Oz and PanTheryx said they were not available for comment.

Traditionally, directors make sure the company they serve is generally staying on the right side of the market and the right side of the law. Boards are also responsible for some nitty-gritty aspects of corporate governance, like overseeing external auditors and determining compensation packages.

Is a surgeon turned Emmy-winning daytime television talk show host really qualified to do that?

For a company in biotech and health care, it would make sense, said Robert Pozen, who teaches two courses on corporate governance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Sloan School of Management. You wouldnt want him to be on General Motors.

In a statement, the company said it expects Oz to advise it on expanding its impact and will bring his decades of medical, nutrition, wellness, and communications expertise to the PanTheryx board.

Two kinds of people wind up as directors, said Pozen, who has served on Medtronics board and is the former president of Fidelity Investments. You want what people think of as domain experts so if its a biotech company, you want someone who knows something about biotech or health care, he said. And you want people who have the more technical knowledge about governance and compensation.

Chances are that Oz is intended to sit in the former category, not the latter. PanTheryx is a nutraceutical company with one medical food product on the market. That product, DiaResQ, is made in part with the milk that cows produce shortly after they give birth. Sometimes called bovine colostrum, that milk can be used to treat diarrhea in human children, too.

But the company, which has raised $170 million over the last 12 years, has also begun exploring more traditional drugs, too. Its scientists are currently running preclinical studies for drugs intended to treat C. difficile infections, Crohns disease, ulcerative colitis, and the diarrhea that some chemotherapy patients experience.

Oz wont be the only notable name on the companys board. Dr. Rajiv Shah, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, joined the board in April. Tom Bumol, the executive director of the Allen Institute for Immunology one of several research organizations founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen also joined that month.

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TV personality Dr. Oz is now on the board of a biotech company - STAT