Replacing Ian McDonald as head of drug discovery at Structural Bioinformatics is Ruth Nutt, who will be the company''s new acting head of drug discovery and a member of its scientific advisory board. She will oversee all drug discovery efforts and report to David Muth, the company''s president and chief operating officer.
Nutt is joining the company from Corvas International, where she directed the medicinal and analytical chemistry discovery research efforts. Prior to that, she spent 31 years at Merck. Nutt holds more than 30 patents.
The Japanese Inamori Foundation has awarded its 2002 Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology to Leroy Hood, president and director of the Institute for Systems Biology, the foundation said last week.
The award, which will be given on November 10 in Kyoto, includes a gold medal, a diploma, and ¥50 million (about $400,000). The Inamori foundation, founded by Kyocera chairman emeritus Kazuo Inamori in 1984, has assets of ¥64.5 billion (about $500 million).
The Kyoto Prizes are given each year to people who are said to have “contributed significantly to human progress” in the areas of advanced technology, basic sciences, and arts and philosophy. Hood is being recognized for his work mapping the human genome.
Charles Delisi, a professor of science and engineering and the dean emeritus of Boston University College of Engineering, has been appointed to Strand Genomics’ scientific advisory board. The Bangalore, India-based bioinformatics company chose Delisi due to his “unique insights” into the high-throughput genomics sector. Delisi heads the biomolecular systems laboratory at the Center for Advanced Genomic Technology in Boston.
Nina Giles has been appointed the new vice president of business development at Hyseq Pharmaceuticals, the Sunnyvale, Calif., parent of sequencing microarray maker Callida Genomics. Giles previously worked in various management positions at Incyte from 1997 to 2002, most recently serving as vice president, business development. Giles has also held both analyst and management positions at Frost & Sullivan.