Sera Appoints Jay M. Moyes as Chief Financial Officer

April 2, 2020 –Salt Lake City Utah –Sera, Inc., The Pregnancy Company™, focused on improving maternal and neonatal health through innovative precision biomarker approaches, today announced the appointment of Jay M. Moyes as Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Moyes joins Sera as it transitions from rigorous scientific and groundbreaking clinical stage company into a rapidly growing commercial organization.

For more than two decades, Jay Moyes has served in C-level executive and board positions of both private and public companies. He currently serves as Director on the public boards of Achieve Life Sciences (NASDAQ: ACHV), BioCardia (NASDAQ: BCDA) and Puma Biotechnologies (NYSE: PBYI). Previous roles include board director service with Predictive Technology Group (PRED); Osiris Therapeutics (OSIR); and Integrated Diagnostics (acquired by Biodesix). Jay also served as Chief Financial Officer and Director of the publicly traded biomaterials company, Amedica Corporation (now SINTX Technologies), managing the company’s IPO and listing on NASDAQ; and as Chief Financial Officer at XDx (now CareDx – CDNA).  

At Myriad Genetics (MYGN) , Jay led the finance function for 14 years from the company’s early private stage development beginning with 7 employees, through its successful IPO in 1996, and serving until 2007 as Chief Financial Officer during Myriad’s rapid growth trajectory to become one of the world’s most highly profitable molecular diagnostics companies, with over 900 employees.  During that time, Moyes spearheaded the efforts in raising more than $500 million in public and private financings.

“I am thrilled to be working with Jay Moyes again, as we build Sera into a highly successful and profitable enterprise,” said Gregory C. Critchfield, MD., MS, chairman and CEO. “Jay’s deep financing connections and expertise in leading biopharmaceutical, medical device and diagnostics companies, both in private and public company settings, will help Sera to achieve its vision of improving the health of mothers and babies and reducing the costs of healthcare delivery.”

“Sera has achieved remarkable progress in building a world-class approach to address the immense burden of premature birth,” said Jay Moyes.  “The early data from outcome study reports show that Sera’s PreTRM® strategy works, and that by improving the health of women and babies, the enormous personal, societal and economic consequences of prematurity can be mitigated.  I am excited to join the talented Sera team and help accelerate the company’s progress, as Greg and I successfully did together at Myriad.”

About Sera, Inc.
Sera is the leading health diagnostics company dedicated to improving the lives of women and babies through precision pregnancy care. Sera delivers pivotal information in early pregnancy to physicians, enabling them to improve health of their patients, resulting in reductions in the costs healthcare delivery.  Sera has a robust pipeline of innovative diagnostic tests focused on the early prediction of preterm birth risk and other complications of pregnancy. Sera’s precision medicine PreTRM® test reports to a physician the individualized risk of premature delivery in a pregnancy, enabling earlier proactive interventions in women with higher risk. Sera is located in Salt Lake City, Utah. For more information, please visit the company’s website at www.sera.com.

About Preterm Birth
Preterm birth is defined as any birth before 37 weeks gestation and is the leading cause of illness and death in newborns.  The 2019 March of Dimes Report Card shows that of nearly 4 million babies born annually in the U.S., more than one in ten is born prematurely.¹ Prematurity is associated with a significantly increased risk of major long-term medical complications, including learning disabilities, cerebral palsy, chronic respiratory illness, intellectual disability, seizures, and vision and hearing loss, and can generate significant costs throughout the lives of affected children. The annual US health care costs to manage complications of prematurity were estimated at $31.5B for 2015.²

About the PreTRM® Test
The PreTRM® test is the only clinically validated commercially available blood test that provides an early individual risk prediction for spontaneous preterm birth in asymptomatic, singleton pregnancies. The PreTRM® test measures and analyzes proteins in the blood that are highly predictive of preterm birth. The PreTRM® test permits physicians to identify, as early as 19 weeks of pregnancy, which women are at increased risk for premature delivery, enabling more informed clinical decisions based on each woman’s individual risk, so that her care can be personalized to address her risk. The PreTRM® test is ordered by a medical professional. For more information about the PreTRM® test, please visit www.PreTRM.com and the PreTRM® test YouTube Channel. You can also join the conversation on Facebook and @PreTRM.

About Sera’s Science

Using its advanced mass spectrometry platform, Sera detects biologically important protein expression changes to build high performing predictions of risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes (including preterm birth, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, growth restriction, and others).  Rigorous clinical validation of PreTRM® test performance (accuracy of predicting premature delivery) was reported in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2016 in a US cohort of 5,501 patients across 11 centers.  Subsequent scientific work has confirmed performance of Sera’s biomarker predictions in cohorts of patients across the globe: US, Europe, Asia and Africa, with over 10,500 patients tested in studies.

About Clinical Outcomes Data

Sera’s validated PreTRM® prediction has been taken into prospective intervention studies, where populations of pregnant women have been screened by the Sera test.  Higher PreTRM®-risk pregnancies are stratified to receive earlier more proactive interventions, and important outcomes are examined in comparison to pregnancies in control groups where the test is not available. 

Topline results showing the benefit of the PreTRM® strategy in a recently completed randomized controlled prospective intervention study (PREVENT PTB Study, NCT03530332) became available online for the Late Breaking Poster Session of the Annual Meeting of the Society of Reproductive Investigation, scheduled for March 14 in 2020 in Vancouver, Canada.

¹ http://www.marchofdimes.org/mission/prematurity-reportcard.aspx
² Caughey et al., Am J Perinatol Rep 2016;6:e407-e416