Silicon Genetics has appointed Deepak Thakkar, formerly director of product management and market development at array analysis rival Rosetta Inpharmatics, as senior director of marketing.
Thakkar will supervise marketing and business strategy for the GeneSpring and GeNet programs. In addition to his experience at Rosetta, Thakkar served as director of genomics at Neomorphic, now an Affymetrix subsidiary, and product manager at Genometrix. Thakkar earned a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences from West Virginia University.
GPC Biotech, of Munich, Germany and Waltham, Mass., has appointed Steven Lazar as vice president and worldwide head of intellectual property. Lazar comes to GPC Biotech, which manufactures BiochipExplorer software and other genomics products, from Genzyme, where he served as managing intellectual property counsel. Lazar also has held positions at Genetics Institute and Ciba-Geigy. Lazar holds a JD from Duke University School of Law and a B.S. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lazar will work out of GPC Biotechs Waltham office.
Aviva Biosciences, a privately held biochip startup in San Diego, has appointed Peter Wilding CEO and president. Wilding previously co-founded ChemCore, a biochip company acquired by Caliper Technologies. He has also served as vice president of SmithKline Beechams geometric data division, vice president in the diagnostics division of Technicon Instruments, and professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Wilding has also been president of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. Wilding replaces Julian Yuan, a co-founder, initial investor, and the first CEO of Aviva Biosciences. Yuan will now serve as vice-chairman of the company, which is developing and commercializing microfluidics biochips for sample preparation of DNA or RNA from blood, cells, and other biological fluids.