NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Luminex President and CEO Patrick Balthrop has retired, the firm announced this week. His retirement is effective immediately, as is his retirement from the firm's board of directors. He has been succeeded as president and CEO by Nachum Shamir, who is expected to be invited to join Luminex's board of directors.
Shamir most recently served as president and CEO of Given Imaging, which was acquired by Covidien earlier this year. He previously was president of Eastman Kodak's transaction and industrial solutions business. He also was president and CEO of Scitex.
Rubicon Genomics has hired Karl Hecker as vice president of product development. Previously, he was a principal scientist at HTG Molecular Diagnostics. He has also held positions at Quidel, PerkinElmer, Invitrogen, and Transgenomic.
Cypher Genomics has formed a scientific advisory board to guide the development and implementation of its products. It has appointed Kelly Bethel, Michael Hultner, Myla Lai-Goldman, Arnold Levine, and Diego Miralles. Cypher's co-founder Nicholas Schork will chair the board.
Bethel is a practicing hematopathologist in the Scripps Clinic Medical Group and holds an adjunct appointment at the Scripps Research Institute. She is also the medical director of the Blood Bank at Scripps Clinic and Green Hospital.
Hultner is chief scientist for Lockheed Martin's Health and Life Sciences division where he manages a diverse portfolio of healthcare innovations, including big data analytics, population-scale genomics, and synthetic biology.
Lai-Goldman is CEO and co-founder of GeneCentric Diagnostics, which spun out from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She also spent more than 18 years at Laboratory Corporation of America, serving as executive vice president, chief medical officer, and chief scientific officer.
Levine is a cancer research scientist and discovered the p53 tumor suppressor protein in 1979. He established the Simons Center for Systems Biology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Previously, he was president of Rockefeller University, and prior to that he was the Harry C. Wiess Professor in Life Sciences and former chairman of the department of molecular biology at Princeton University.
Miralles is global head of innovation at Janssen and leads a group focused on integrating emerging technologies and partnerships in areas including genomics and clinical trials. He is also management sponsor of Janssen Labs and site head of the Janssen West Coast Research Center, part of Janssen Research & Development.
Molecular diagnostics firm Xagenic has appointed Timothy Still its new president and CEO and member of the board of directors. Still most recently served as president and CEO of Accumetrics, a point-of-care diagnostics company. Prior to that, he was executive VP and chief commercial officer of Hemosense, and he also previously served as VP of sales and marketing at Cholestech.
Great Basin Scientific named Jeffrey Rona its Chief Financial Officer and appointed Ronald Labrum and Sam Chawla to its board. Rona has been a financial consultant to Great Basin, which went public last week, since 2013 and has been the managing director of Rona Capital since 2011. Prior to that, he was the chief business officer of GlobeImmune. Labrum was CEO of Fenwal between 2007 and 2012. Before that, he was CEO of Cardinal Health's Healthcare Supply Chain Services and the specialty distribution businesses of Cardinal Health. Chawla is a portfolio manager for investment fund Perceptive Advisors, where he leads its Credit Opportunities Fund. He previously was a managing director at UBS Securities in the Global Healthcare Group.
Proteome Sciences appointed Martin Diggle to its board as a non-executive director. Diggle is a director and partner at Vulpes Investment Management, where he manages the Vulpes Life Sciences Fund, which holds roughly 16 percent of Proteome Sciences' ordinary shares. He is also a non-executive director of Oxford Biomedica and Chronos Therapeutics.
Appistry said this week that it has appointed Cornelius (Neal) Boerkoel as the company's first chief medical officer. Boerkoel is currently a clinical associate professor and clinical investigator in the Provincial Medical Genetics Program and Child and Family Research Institute, where he will retain his appointments. He has also served as a staff clinician and directed the translational laboratory at the National Institutes of Health Undiagnosed Diseases Program, and is a co-founder of the Rare Disease Foundation.
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