Bee Genomics Researcher Gets Prize; Parallele Appoints Andre Marion to Board; and Others

NEW YORK, Feb. 12 -- Jay Evans, of the US Agricultural Research Service Bee Research Laboratory, and Steven Larson, of the ARS Forage and Research Laboratory, have won early "Early Career Scientist of the Year" awards from the Service, the ARS said today. Evans won for his "contributions in genomics research of honey bees and their parasites, pests and pathogens," and Larson won for "gene mapping and related research in support of range plant improvement and use," according to an ARS statement.

The researchers were to be each presented with a plaque, a cash award, and additional research funding at an awards ceremony today.

ParAllele BioScience has appointed Applied Biosystems co-founder Andre Marion to its board of directors, the company said Feb. 11.

Marionserved as chairman, CEO, and president of ABI for several years until the company's merger with Perkin Elmer. He held various R&D management positions with Hewlett-Packard. Marion currently serves as a director on the boards of Aclara BioSciences, Molecular Devices, Cygnus, and Applied Imaging.

Curt LaBelle was appointed a senior associate in the health care investment department at Venture Capital firm Tullis-Dickerson Feb. 11. LaBelle comes to the company from seed-stage life sciences venture firm Convergent Ventures, which is in Los Angeles. He also was a founder of Neurion Pharmaceuticals, a Caltech spinout, and worked in cardiovascular research and marketing at Pfizer. LaBelle holds a joint MD/MBA from ColumbiaUniversity.

Tullis- Dickerson, based in Greenwich, Conn., finances early-stage life sciences companies including LumiCyte, Prolinx, and SciMagix.

David Campbell has been appointed CSO of Etiologics, based in Oxford, UK, the company said Feb. 10.  Campbellpreviously served as director and head of molecular genetics, Europe, for GlaxoSmithKline.  

Before joining GSK, Campbellwas a senior research fellow at the molecular medicine unit of the University of Leeds.

Etiologics, a spinoff from the UKMedical Research Council's mammalian genetics lab, has a trove of sperm from mutant mice that were modified through ENU mutagenesis, a chemical process that induces single-point mutations in DNA. The company uses its bioinformatics technology to analyze and make sense of the mouse DNA, for collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

Ardais has appointed to its scientific advisory board Todd Golub, director for cancer genomics at the Whitehead/MIT Center for Genome Research, the company said Feb. 10.

Golub, who is also a pediatric oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, received his MD from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.

Ardais, based in Lexington, Mass., hopes to develop and license a nationwide repository of diseased human tissue samples.