Mr. Maetzold founded Castle Biosciences in 2007 and initiated operations in late 2008. Mr. Maetzold is currently President, CEO, and a Board member of Castle Biosciences. Mr. Maetzold founded Castle Biosciences with the belief that treatment decisions for patients diagnosed with underserved cancers could be significantly improved if appropriate molecular biology was examined in addition to traditional histology or cytology based assessments. Castle Biosciences is a privately funded company. Lead investors include HealthQuest Capital, Mountain Group Capital, Industry Ventures, Longfellow Partners and others.
Castle Biosciences represents Mr. Maetzold’s first experience in molecular diagnostics. His prior 24 years was spent in pharmaceutical development and commercialization – roughly splitting time between the multi-national firms of Sandoz (now Novartis) and Schering (now Merck) and biotechnology firms of Amylin (now BMS / Zeneca) and Encysive Pharmaceuticals (now Pfizer). Mr. Maetzold’s career in pharmaceuticals was primarily focused on new product development through business licensing and commercial oversight of pre-approved therapies.
Mr. Maetzold is a co-inventor of several technologies, including the combination of low dose PDE5 inhibitors and selective endothelin receptor antagonists for use in pulmonary diseases, a gene expression profile assay for the differential diagnosis and prognosis of thymic carcinoma and thymoma, a gene expression profile assay for the prognosis of cutaneous melanoma, and a gene expression profile assay for the prognosis of sarcoma.