Acoustic biosensor technology company Akubio announced this week the appointment of Andrew Carr as executive chairman of its board of directors. Carr succeeds John Padfield, who has chosen to leave his post as non-executive chairman in order to “focus on other business commitments.”
Over the past 18 years, Carr has worked as director and CEO of Amersham Biosciences.
Lance Liotta and Emanuel Petricoin have been appointed to the faculty of George Mason University, the university said this week. They are co-directors of the National Cancer Institute/Food and Drug Administration Clinical Proteomics Program.
Liotta is also chief of the laboratory of pathology at NCI’s center for cancer research. He holds a medical degree from Case Western Reserve Medical School and a doctoral degree in biomedical engineering from Case Western Reserve University. His appointment is effective May 15.
Petricoin is also a senior investigator in the office of cell tissue and gene therapies in the center for biologics evaluation and research. He holds a doctorate in microbiology from the University of Maryland at College Park. He begins his appointment April 1.
The Universtiy of Dundee’s Medical Research Council’s Protein Phosphorylation Unit marked the 50th anniversary of the discovery of protein phosphorylation this week with a symposium held in honor of Nobel Laureate Edmond Fischer who, in collaboration with Edwin Krebs, made a key discovery about phosphorylation in muscles in 1955.
Following Fischer’s ground-breaking discovery, it was shown that protein phosphorylation plays a major role in regulating almost all aspects of cell life. It also became clear that major diseases, including cancer, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis were a consequence of imbalanced or abnormal phosphorylations. As a consequence of these discoveries, about one third of all R&D programs in pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are now concentrated on the area of protein phosphorylation, according to the MRC.