LifeSpan Biosciences has appointed Daniel Chen as vice president for marketing and business development. He joins the company from Alaris Medical Systems, where he served as business director for anesthesia monitoring. In previous positions, Chen worked as a management consultant at A.T. Kearney and as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch.
Icogen has added James Glavin and Gregory Sessler to its board of directors. Glavin has been chairman of the board of directors of Immune Response since 1993. Sessler served as senior vice president and chief financial officer of Rosetta Inpharmatics from 2000 until its acquisition by Merck last year.
Riverside Partners, an investment firm, has taken a minority ownership position in Applied Precision. Applied Precision founder Ron Seubert assumes the role of chief executive officer, and three representatives from Riverside will join Seubert and Applied Precision’s two other founders on the newly-formed nine-seat management board.
Janet Thornton, director of the European Bioinformatics Institute, was honored last week for her work in protein structure modeling and analysis. Giving the Feodor Lynen Lecture at the Nature Biotechnology Winter Symposium in Miami, Fla., Thornton talked about the need to identify the “druggable proteome” and noted that today’s known drug targets comprise just 4 percent of the genome. “The challenge we all face is to interpret genome sequences in terms of their biological functions,” she said. Among numerous other honors, Thornton was made a Commander of the British Empire last year.