NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Frederick Sanger, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1958 for determining the structure of insulin, and again in 1980 for his work on sequencing DNA, has died at age 95.
He was a biochemist at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge until his retirement in 1983. His group was the first to produce a whole genome sequence — 5,000 letters long of the virus phiX174 — and they also sequenced the first bit of human genetic material, the 16,000-letter sequence of DNA in a mitochondrion, the batteries inside biological cells.
His sequencing technique — dideoxy, or Sanger, sequencing — is still in use today. The Wellcome Trust named the Sanger Centre after him.
PerkinElmer said this week that it has appointed Jon DiVincezo to be president of its Environmental Health business and senior VP of PerkinElmer. Maurice Tenney, who has led the Environmental Health business for four years, will start in a new position at PerkinElmer overseeing global operations and customer logistics.
DiVincenzo will assume the new post on Dec. 2, and will report to Chairman and CEO Robert Friel.
Prior to joining PerkinElmer, DiVincenzo served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Enzymatics, and before that he worked at Millipore for 18 years where he last served as president of the Bioscience division.
Transgenomic has appointed Stephen Miller senior vice president and general manager of its patient testing business unit.
Miller most recently provided commercial and strategic consultancy services to a variety of diagnostic companies, including Transgenomic. Prior to that, he was chief commercial officer at BG Medicine. Miller has also served as president and chief commercial officer for Mira Dx, and vice president of sales and marketing for Athena Diagnostics.
NanoString Technologies has appointed David Ghesquiere senior vice president of corporate and business development.
In this role, Ghesquiere will work with NanoString CEO Brad Gray to shape the company's strategy while leading its corporate and business development efforts, NanoString said.
Ghesquiere joins NanoString from Dendreon, where he served as senior vice president of corporate and business development. He has also served in executive roles at OSI Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Astellas) and Aventis Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Sanofi).
NMS Labs has appointed Pierre Cassigneul as president and CEO, and as a member of the board. Cassigneul most recently served as president and CEO of Predictive Biosciences, and prior to that as president and CEO of XDx.
NMS Labs is an ISO-accredited international forensic and clinical reference laboratory based in Willow Grove, Pa.
Oncoplex Diagnostics has appointed Jedd Levine chief medical officer.
Levine is managing director with JL Healthcare Consultants and he has a faculty appointment in the Medical Oncology department at the Yale University School of Medicine. He also has served as managing partner for Connecticut Oncology and Hematology, CMO at Egenix, and as a clinical assistant professor on the medical oncology faculty at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Intrexon has appointed Peter Seufer-Wasserthal VP of business development for Europe and Asia and Dana Di Ferdinando to be chief information officer, effective immediately.
Seufer-Wasserthal previously was senior VP of pharmaceuticals at Codexis, and before that he was senior VP of clinical development at Morphochem.
Di Ferdinando most recently was CIO at Arena Pharmaceuticals, and before that she worked for Deloitte and Touche and SAIC.
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