Alcor Scientific taps new CEO as it embarks on expansion

NORTH SMITHFIELD – As Alcor Scientific Inc. seeks to expand through a partnership with an out-of-state health care investor, the North Smithfield-based medical technology manufacturer announced Wednesday that it has appointed Jim Post as its new CEO and president.

Throughout the past year, Post served as an executive adviser for the Chicago-based strategic health care investor Water Street Healthcare Partners, which is now investing in Alcor Scientific in an effort to grow the Rhode Island company by boosting its production of diagnostic instrumentation and medical devices.

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Water Street Healthcare Partners declined to share how much money it is investing in the expansion of Alcor Scientific, but a spokesperson described it as a “significant amount of equity.” The goal is to make Alcor Scientific a global leader in the medical diagnostics industry, the companies said.

“Alcor is an outstanding company with great people who are passionate about what they do and it shows in their results,” Post said in a statement. “I’m excited to be joining the company at this point in its history and development and to work together to achieve our shared goal of building Alcor into a global diagnostics leader.”

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Alcor Scientific was founded in 2010 and is known as one of the only providers of a fully automated solution for erythrocyte sedimentation rate testing, a type of blood test that measures how quickly red blood cells settle at the bottom of a test tube as a way to detect inflammation in the body, which can be a sign of a chronic disease, an immune disorder or another medical condition.

Alcor Scientific employs more than 50 people in North Smithfield, with about 20 of them on the production team there. The company manufactures more than 5,000 such devices annually, including feeding pumps that are used in hospitals and skilled nursing facilities to support critically ill patients, as part of its SentinelPlus line of products. Its automated erythrocyte sedimentation rate analyzers, used in clinical diagnostics laboratories, are known as the iSED and miniiSED.

The company was founded by Carlo Ruggeri, formed as a merger between OST Medical Inc. and Diagnostic Systems Inc.

“Innovation is the cornerstone of Alcor,” Ruggeri said. “Our family founded and grew this company by conceiving and developing new medical technologies that meaningfully improve patient care. I’m very pleased to have found in Water Street a strategic partner that values our legacy and will help us build on it.”

Ruggeri welcomed Post to the company’s leadership team. Post is also serving on the company’s board of directors. Post takes the position held for the last five years by Karla Ruggeri, Carlo Ruggeri’s daughter, who will continue to serve on Alcor’s leadership team as general manager, according to the company.

Prior to his role with Water Street Healthcare Partners, Post worked for Thermo Fisher Scientific in New Hampshire. He served as CEO from 2018 through 2020 after serving as president and vice president for the company for two years before that, Alcor said. Post helped grow and sell Thermo Fisher Scientific’s anatomic pathology business to PHC Holdings Corp. Post led PHC’s newly formed entity, Epredia, to become a “global leader in precision cancer and tissue diagnostics,” according to Alcor.

Before his time at the New Hampshire company, Post held executive leadership positions at Alere Inc. (now known as Abbott), another medical diagnostics manufacturing company, serving as its president and managing its hospital products that represented $500 million in annual revenue.

“Water Street’s diagnostics and medical products expertise combined with the experience of our new CEO, Jim Post, will help us not only build – but accelerate – Alcor’s next phase of innovation and growth,” Carlo Ruggeri said.

Marc Larocque is a PBN staff writer. Contact him at Larocque@PBN.com. You may also follow him on Twitter @LaRockPBN.