Sequenom has announced the following executive and board changes: John Nestor has been appointed executive vice president of drug discovery to help ‘integrate’ the company's pharmaceutical unit; Michael Terry was hired as executive vice president of sales and marketing.
Daniel Kisner and Ronald Lindsay have been named to the company’s board of directors.
Nestor comes to Sequenom from Syntex Discovery Research where he was vice president and director of the company’s Institute of Bio-Organic Chemistry. Terry was previously with General Electric's Marquette Medical Systems division, where he held positions in sales management, business-unit management, and commercial operations.
Kisner currently serves as chairman of Avera Pharmaceuticals and Caliper Technologies. He was Caliper's president and CEO until 2002. Lindsay is currently vice president of research and development and chief science officer of diaDexus, where George Poste, chairman of Sequenom’s erstwhile competitor Orchid Biosciences, is chairman.
Paradigm Genetics has appointed Alan Higgins as senior director of investigational medicine, and Faye O'Brien as senior director of healthcare marketing. Higgins comes to Paradigm from drug-delivery company Nobex, where he was senior director of pharmacology. O'Brien joins Paradigm from Gene Logic, where she had been senior director of product management and marketing. In addition, Ben Nouri will now oversee Paradigm’s marketing operations in addition to his current global sales management duties, and Mario Noyer-Weidner will run all biosystems research and development. Nouri has been with Paradigm since 1997, and Noyer-Weidner joined in 2000.
Transgenomic has made the following executive changes: Michael Draper has been appointed chief financial officer, succeeding interim CFO William Rasmussen, who remains with the company in a “strategic planning” capacity. Mitchell Murphy, currently vice president, secretary and treasurer, has assumed formal responsibility for corporate governance and regulatory compliance.
Lastly, Leo Beigelman will oversee all chemistry research and development, and John Allbery will run Transgenomic’s nucleic acid-synthesis operations. Beigelman joined Transgenomic in 2002. Allbery, who now manages global manufacturing operations for both business segments, joined the company in 2001.
SeqWright has hired Bruce Simmons as senior sales manager in charge of North American sales. Simmons comes to SeqWright from Applied Biosystems, where he worked since 1990, most recently as senior sales representative.
Houston, Texas-based SeqWright is a contract molecular biology company specializing in DNA sequencing and other related services.
Alex Mackenzie has been appointed vice president of research for Genome Canada.
Mackenzie, who will assume the post July 1, currently serves as director of the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute in Ottawa, and as a professor at the University of Ottawa in the faculty of Medicine.