NEW YORK, Dec. 12 — Deltagen announced Wednesday that it had appointed Majid Mehtali as scientific director of Deltagen Europe, the company’s new genomics research and development center in Strasbourg, France.
Mehtali will lead Deltagen Europe’s efforts to expand its in vivo research work. The company’s principal product is a database of in vivo derived mammalian gene function information, used by pharmaceutical companies to discover and validate drug targets.
Mehtali was previously vice president of research at Crucell, the Dutch human antibody-based therapeutic firm in the Netherlands, and was also head of the gene therapy division at Transgene.
The new Deltagen Europe center, announced in September, is scheduled to be finished in 2003.
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Sequenom announced a host of appointments and promotions on Dec. 10, including leaders of two new business divisions.
Rick Episcopo , formerly the company’s senior vice president of commercial operations, will now lead the company’s new Genetic Systems business unit. Andreas Braun, the company’s chief medical officer, will lead Sequenom Pharmaceuticals.
In other appointments, Tristan Orpin , the company’s director of sales and marketing, was promoted to vice president of sales and marketing. Jay Lichter , a veteran of Pfizer and Genset, has been hired as executive vice president of business development and will lead efforts to collaborate with pharmaceutical companies.
Charles Rodi , the company’s vice president of molecular biology, was promoted as executive vice president of genomics and will lead the company’s high-throughput genotyping center. Richard Macdonald of the company’s bioinformatics group was also promoted to senior vice president of corporate research.
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St. Louis, Mo.-based GenoMed said Dec. 7 that Tony Frudakis had joined its scientific advisory board.
Frudakis is chief executive and scientific officer of DNAPrint Genomics, based in Sarasota, Fla.
GenoMed is a medical genomics company that specializes in correlating disease genes with clinical practice, particularly genes connected to type 2 diabetes, various cancers, and high blood pressure.
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Xanthon, the Research Triangle Park, N.C.-based bioinformatics firm, said Dec. 6 that it had promoted Neil Moore to vice president of business development.
Moore will be responsible for business development, partnerships and marketing of the company’s electrochemical detection technology for direct analysis of DNA, RNA and proteins. That technology is now being developed into an expression analysis system that is planned to be launched early next year.
Moore has been with the company since 1999 as director of business development. He was previously director of business development at SARCO, a combinatorial and medicinal chemistry product firm.