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Clinical Data Taps New Sales VP for PGxHealth; Gene Logic Fleshes Out Board; GeneNews Updates Brass; and Others

Apr 13, 2007
This article has been updated from a previous version, which incorrectly reported that James Shaffer was previously employed at Shire, rather than New River Pharmaceuticals.
 
NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) — Gene Logic has added David Urdal and Mark Gabrielson to its board of directors, while Jules Blake has retired from the board, the company said this week.
 
Urdal is currently senior vice president and CSO at Dendreon. Previously he was president of Immunex.
 
Gabrielson is co-founder, director, and CEO of Pulmatrix, and has held posts at SmithKline Beecham and Prince Ventures.
 
Blake has been a board director at Gene Logic since 1994.
 
GeneNews has named Ming Xu as director of product development, and has promoted interim CFO Colin West to vice president of finance and CFO. 
 
Xu has worked with Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics as principal scientist and at Abbott as senior scientist.
 
West formerly was president and CEO of Richtree Market Restaurants and was a senior partner in an accounting company.
 
GeneNews also said that Bruno Maruzzo and Roman Zastawny are leaving the company immediately.
 
Thermo Fisher Scientific said this week that Paul Meister will retire from his positions on the company’s board in mid May. Meister has decided not to run for re-election at the annual stockholder’s meeting, and has relinquished his duties as chairman.
 
Clinical Data has hired James Shaffer to be vice president of sales and marketing in its PGxHealth division, the company said this week.
 
Shaffer previously was a vice president in sales and marketing at New River Pharmaceuticals, was at Prestwick Pharmaceuticals as senior director, was a sales director at InterMune, and worked at GlaxoSmithKline and Merck.
 
RXi Pharmaceuticals has named Nassim Usman to its scientific advisory board, parent company CytRx said this week.
 
Usman currently is CEO and director of Catalyst Biosciences. He formerly was CSO and COO at Sirna Therapeutics where he developed that company’s RNAi technology and advanced RNA drugs toward clinical development.
 
Stephen Blose has been elected to be chairman of BioMicro Systems, the company said this week. Blose has been a member of BioMicro’s board for three years.
 
Blose is CEO of Mill Valley Summit Group, which offers services and consulting for venture capital firms and life science companies.
 
Blose also has been a division general manager at Bio-Rad, working on commercializing DNA, informatics, and other systems. Before that he was president and CEO of Protein Databases.
 
The J. Craig Venter Institute is shuffling some of its executive staff while restructures its organizations.
 
The institute said that Craig Venter will remain JCVI chairman and president; Robert Strausberg will move from his job as president of the Center for the Advancement of Genomics division to become deputy director of the JCVI; and Marv Frazier will shift from vice president of research at TCAG to become executive vice president of research of JCVI.

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