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People In The News: Oct 12, 2012

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Quest Diagnostics this week announced the addition of new members to its management team as part of a reorganization, while several senior members are departing.

Everett Cunningham joins Quest as of Oct. 15 as senior vice president, Commercial; John Haydon joins the firm on Oct. 22 as SVP, Operations; and Jeffrey Shuman joins Quest on Oct. 22 as SVP, Chief Human Resources Officer.

Cunningham was most recently regional president of Established Products, Asia for Pfizer. Haydon is currently executive VP and global head of Operations and Business Excellence for Philips Electronics. Shuman was most recently SVP: chief human resources and administrative officer for Harris Corp.

Leaving Quest are Richard Mahoney, VP, Healthcare Information Services; Joan Miller SVP, Oncology and Neurology Services; and David Norgard, VP Human Resources. They will leave by the end of the year.

Also, Joseph Benage, VP, Insurer & Employer Services, is leaving in 2013.


Bill Bowen has been appointed by Sequenom SVP and general counsel. He will report directly to Chairman and CEO Harry Hixson and will be responsible for the company's legal and patent issues.

Bowen was previously with Gen-Probe, where he was SVP and general counsel. Before that he was a business litigation partner at Luce Forward Hamilton & Scripps.


David Elkins, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Becton Dickinson, will resign from the firm following the release of the company's Fiscal Year 2012 results on Nov. 7.

He is leaving to become CFO at technology licensing firm Round Rock Research. Seketu Upadhyay, currently SVP and controller, will become interim CFO at BD effective Nov. 9. He previously was CFO of BD's international operations, and before joining the company in 2010 he held senior level finance positions at Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca. BD's board intends to start a search for Elkin's successor, the company said.


Nabsys announced two additions to its senior management team. Peter Lewis has joined the firm as CFO while Darren Lee is vice president of business development.

Lewis has more than 20 years of experience in accounting, financial management, and corporate process development. He was previously VP of finance and administration at Bioscale, and earlier held the same post at Affymetrix. Before that he was CFO of Genetic MicroSystems and held senior level positions at First Boston Pharma, Instron, and Perkin-Elmer.

Lee has more than 25 years of experience in marketing management, business development, and engineering in the life sciences and clinical diagnostics industries. Before landing at Nabsys, he was VP of marketing for the Tissue Imaging business at PerkinElmer, following that firm's purchase of Caliper Life Sciences. He joined Caliper when it bought Cambridge Research & Instrumentation, where he was VP of marketing. He was also VP of corporate development at PrimeraDx and at Decision Biomarkers.


Rosetta Genomics said that Robert Wassman has joined the company in the newly created position of chief medical officer, and Dganit Bar is joining in the newly created position of chief scientific officer.

They both start at Rosetta on Oct. 22.

Wassman has more than 30 years of experience in executive roles and was most recently CMO, executive VP, and chief genomics officer at Generation Health. He also has held management positions at Helicos BioSciences; Genzyme Genetics, now called Integrated Genetics and part of Laboratory Corporation of America; Alfigen/The Genetics Institute; Good Start Genetics; and Genetrix.

Bar was most recently executive director of Science and Technology at BioLineRx. Between 2000 and 2004, she was head of cancer research at QBI Enterprises.


Genome Canada has appointed Lorne Hepworth the new chair of it board, effective immediately. He replaces Thomas Caskey, who was chair for three years.

Hepworth has been president of CropLife Canada since 1997 and has been a member of the Canadian Agri-Food Research Council, as well as the federal government's Pest Management Advisory Committee and National Biotechnology Advisory Committee. He has been a director of Genome Canada's board since June 2010.


Former J&J executive Roy Davis has been appointed to Nanosphere's board.

Davis spent almost 30 years with J&J before retiring on Jan. 1, 2012, and was president of J&J Development and VP of corporate development for all of J&J. Prior to that, Davis was Company Group chairman and Worldwide Franchise chairman, Diagnostics after running several other J&J businesses.


CombiMatrix board member Joseph Limber has resigned, the company said. He also resigned from the Audit Committee, Compensation Committee, and Nominating and Governance Committee. He is leaving due to personal reasons.


Thomas Mac Mahon is retiring from the board of Laboratory Corporation of America at the end of his current term on May 8, 2013. MacMahon has been a director at the company since 1995, and from 1997 until 2006 he was president and CEO of LabCorp, before retiring. From 2007 to 2009 he served as non-executive chairman of the board.

LabCorp also announced that Peter Neupert has been appointed to the board effective Jan. 1, 2013. He is an operating partner at private equity firm Health Evolution Partners. Prior to joining the company, he was corporate VP of the Microsoft Health Solutions Group from 2005 to 2012 and was president and CEO of drugstore.com from 1998 to 2001. He served on the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee from 2003 to 2005, co-chairing the Health Information Technology subcommittee.


Adaptive Biotechnologies named Ilan Kirsch SVP of translational medicine. He will lead the development and launch of clinical diagnostic applications stemming from the firm's immunoSeq and quanTILfy technology platforms. He joined Adaptive Bio on Oct. 8 and reports directly to CEO Chad Robins.

Kirsch was most recently executive director of Oncology Research at Amgen. Before that he spent 20 years at the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, where he at various times was chief of the genetics branch, Center for Cancer Research, and director of a CLIA-certified laboratory for diagnostic oncology.


Alex Bateman is joining the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute as head of protein sequence resources, replacing Rolf Apweiler.

Bateman starts his new job on Nov. 1. He is currently senior investigator at Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where in his 15 years he has led the development of protein and RNA family databases. He has published more than 120 scientific papers and reviews and his work has been cited more than 26,000 times.


Proteros Biostructures appointed Arnd Christ CFO, effective Nov. 16.

He was CFO of MediGene most recently, and was CFO at other biotech firms in Germany and Switzerland, Proteros said, as well as finance director at Hoechst Group.


Hans Winkler has joined GNS Healthcare as CSO, where he will promote the development of the Big Data analytics' firm's IP, build out its product infrastructure, and build out scientific strategy for GNS's product offerings.

Winkler was most recently senior director and Global Oncology Biomarker program leader at Janssen Oncology Research and Development, a J&J division.


Advion has appointed Vijay Gupta as VP of International Business Development and Support, a position in which he will focus on the firm's expression compact mass spectrometer.

Advion has a multi-channel distribution strategy using distributors, direct sales, and original equipment manufacturer partners, and Gupta will manage and support regional relationships, as well as deal directly with customers in order to broaden Advion's mass spectrometer product lines.

Gupta previously served as head of international sales at Biotage and Biolin.


Mark Viant, a professor at the University of Birmingham in the UK, was elected president of the International Metabolomics Society. He is a professor of metabolomics in the School of Biosciences at the university and serves as director of the Natural Environment Research Council's Environmental Metabolomics Facility at Birmingham.


The American Chemical Society awarded the 2012 Distinguished Scientist Award to Scripps Research Institute professor Phil Baran.

Baran is a professor of chemistry at Scripps, and the award recognizes his "contributions in the area of synthetic organic chemistry, especially creativity in pushing its boundaries with innovative and thoughtful solutions to synthetic problems."


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