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People In The News: Oct 11, 2013

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – SynapDx announced this week that Kevin Hrusovsky has joined the firm's board of directors. He most recently served as president of life sciences and technology at PerkinElmer. Hrusovsky had been CEO of Caliper Life Sciences from 2003 to 2011, when the firm was purchased by PerkinElmer for more than $600 million. He left PerkinElmer earlier this year but agreed to serve as a consultant for up to one year. He also serves on the board of directors of 908 Devices.


MolecularHealth said this week that it has hired Laura Housman to serve as its chief commercial officer. Housman most recently served as vice president of global market access, pricing and health economics at Novartis Pharmaceuticals' Molecular Diagnostics (MDx) and Genoptix.


AdvaMedDx has elected a handful of new members to its board of directors. The new members include Luminex President and CEO Patrick Balthrop, Abbott Laboratories VP of Molecular Diagnostics John Coulter, Hologic Group VP and GM of Diagnostics Rohan Hastie, and Robert Greczyn, interim president and CEO of LipoScience. AdvaMedDx is a division of the Advanced Medical Technology Association that advocates on behalf of the diagnostics industry.


Gen9 this week added two members to its management team. The Cambridge, Mass.-based gene synthesis firm named Christopher Bruce as its new VP of global sales, and it named Devin Leake its VP of R&D.

Bruce joins the company from Cell Signaling Technology, where he most recently served as senior director of sales. He also worked for Invitrogen and Pierce (now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific), where he served as director of global sales. Leake joined from Thermo Fisher, where he most recently was global director of molecular biology and R&D. He previously worked for Dharmacon, which also was acquired by Thermo Fisher.


Penn Medicine, an academic medical center affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, said this week that it has appointed Gary Gilliland as the inaugural vice dean and vice president for precision medicine. In the newly created role, Gilliland will "synthesize Penn Medicine's research and clinical care initiatives across all disciplines to create a national model for the delivery of precise, personalized medicine to patients with diseases of all kinds."

Gilliland joins Penn Medicine from Merck, where he has served since 2009 as senior VP of Merck Research Laboratories and oncology franchise head. He previously was a member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School for nearly 20 years, where he served as a professor of medicine and a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology.

Gilliland received his PhD in microbiology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his MD from the University of California, San Francisco.


Thomas Miller has joined the board of directors of Intelligent MDx, a privately held developer of real-time PCR-based diagnostics. Miller is founder of GreyBird Ventures, an umbrella company for consulting, investment, and management opportunities, and he previously was CEO of the Customer Solutions Division at Siemens Healthcare.


Cergentis, a spin-off from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences that was founded in 2012, has disclosed its management team.

Among the new members are Max van Min, co-inventor of the firm's targeted locus amplification technology, is CEO. Previously, he held management positions at Keygene and DSM. Erik Splinter was named CTO. Previously, he worked on the development of technologies to analyze 3D structures of the human genome at Erasmus MC and the Hubrecht Institute.


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