Following the retirement of Steven Gutman as director of the US Food and Drug Administration's Office of In Vitro Diagnostics, Don St. Pierre is serving as the acting director of the division until a permanent director can be hired.
OIVD has been interviewing candidates and a permanent director is expected to be hired by this spring, according to Alberto Gutierrez, deputy office director of new product evaluation at OIVD, who spoke at meeting of the HHS Secretary's Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health, and Society this week in Washington, DC.
Furthermore, Gutierrez noted that OIVD has formed a new personalized medicine staff. This staff "is in some ways outside of our current structure, and they will be coordinating outreach and internal issues that have to do with personalized medicine and genomics in our office," he said.
BG Medicine has named Doug White to be executive VP and general manager. White has previously been a senior VP of sales and marketing at Qiagen, and he has worked at Digene, Bayer, Chiron Diagnostics, and Abbott Laboratories.