NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Myriad Genetics said this week that James Evans will retire as its CFO "in order to attend to family health issues." Evans will continue to perform his duties until a replacement is found. Myriad said it will hire an executive search firm to identify candidates for consideration.
Evans joined Myriad in 1995 as corporate controller and was promoted to VP of finance in July 2005. He became CFO in November 2007. Evans played a leading role in Myriad's acquisitions of Rules-Based Medicine and Crescendo Biosciences.
Quanterix has named Kevin Hrusovsky executive chairman of its board of directors.
Hrusovsky will replace Martin Madaus, who gave up his chairman seat to be chairman and CEO of Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics but who will remain on the Quanterix board.
Hrusovsky formerly was president of PerkinElmer Life Sciences & Technology. He was CEO of Caliper Life Sciences and joined PerkinElmer after that firm acquired Caliper in 2011 for $600 million. Hrusovsky also previously served as CEO of Zymark, and he was president of FMC Corporation's Pharmaceuticals and International Agricultural Products.
Repligen has elected Nicolas Barthelemy to serve on its board of directors. Barthelemy formerly was president of global commercial operations at Life Technologies, where he served for nine years until the firm was acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific earlier this year for approximately $13.6 billion plus the assumption of $1.5 billion in net debt. In that post, he managed an organization of 3,500 employees, and before that he led Life Technologies' Cell Systems division for five years. He also previously spent eight years with Biogen Idec, eventually becoming VP of manufacturing and general manager for the firm's organization in Research Triangle Park.
Cepheid said this week that it has appointed Peter Farrell as executive vice president of international commercial operations.
He replaces Philippe Jacon, who the company had named head of worldwide commercial operations in January. Jacon is transitioning to the role of president of Cepheid's High-Burden Developing Country business, replacing Paul Steuperaert, who is now focusing on the company's business in sub-Saharan Africa ahead of his 2015 retirement.
Farrell most recently served as divisional vice president and general manager at Abbott Laboratories. Prior to this, he held a number of sales and marketing positions in Abbott's Diagnostics division.
DNA Electronics this week announced the appointment of Nick McCooke as chief business officer. McCooke previously served as CEO of Solexa, which was acquired by Illumina in 2007.
Sequenom said this week that its shareholders have re-elected its board of directors including Kenneth Buechler; John Fazio; Harry Hixson; Myla Lai-Goldman; Richard Lerner; Ronald Lindsay; David Pendarvis; Charles Slacik; and William Welch. They were elected to continue serving until the next stockholder meeting in 2015. Hixson is chairman and CEO of the company.
Knome Co-founder Jorge Conde has joined Syros Pharmaceuticals as CFO and chief product officer where he will lead the platform strategy for Syros' novel gene regulation technology and manage the overall finances for the company. Conde most recently served as Knome's CFO, but has also worked in marketing and operations at MedImmune and Helicos Biosciences. Previously, he was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.
Dan Roden, Vanderbilt University's assistant vice chancellor for Personalized Medicine, has been appointed to the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health. His four-year term on the council begins Oct. 1.
A pharmacogenomics expert, Roden is a principal investigator for two NIH-funded programs at Vanderbilt, the Pharmacogenomics Research Network and the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network. He also directs Vanderbilt's Oates Institute for Experimental Therapeutics.
Baylor College of Medicine said this week it has named Matthew Ellis to be director of the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center, effective Sept. 1. Ellis succeeds Kent Osborne, who is leaving his post to focus on his other job as director of Baylor's Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center.
Ellis, whose clinical research has focused on molecular profiling and mutations related to breast cancer and its treatment, is currently a professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine. His genomics research has been funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Cancer Institute, the AVON Foundation, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure. He previously was on the faculty at Duke University and Georgetown University.
BCM said it received a recruitment grant from the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas to recruit Ellis, who will bring a large resource of patient-derived xenografts with him.
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has appointed three internationally renowned physician-scientists to leadership positions -- Mitchell Weiss, J. Paul Taylor, and Kim Nichols.
Weiss, professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, will chair St. Jude's hematology department. Taylor, who joined the hospital in 2008, will now chair St. Jude's new department of cell and molecular biology, and hold the Edward F. Barry Endowed chair in cell and molecular biology. Nichols, director of the CHOP Pediatric Hereditary Cancer Predisposition Program, will launch St. Jude's new division of hereditary cancer predisposition within the oncology department.
Horizon Discovery has added Susan Galbraith and Susan Searle to serve on its board of directors.
Galbraith is senior VP and head of oncology innovative medicines at Astrazeneca. She formerly was VP of Oncology and Clinical Biomarkers at Bristol-Myers Squibb, and she has more than 20 years of experience in academia and industry.
Searle co-founded Imperial Innovations Group, a technology venture investment firm, and served as its CEO for a more than a decade. She also has held non-executive director positions for a range of technology companies and sits on the board for the Technology Strategy Board's Emerging Technologies group.
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