Thomas Baillie, Barry Karger, John Yates, Kevin Johnson, Eric Jakobsson, Bernd Seizinger

Advion BioSciences of Ithaca, NY, has formed its scientific advisory board and appointed Thomas Baillie, Barry Karger, and John Yates as members. Baillie is vice president of drug metabolism at Merck Research Laboratories in West Point, Pa. Karger directs the Barnett Institute of Chemical and Biological Analysis at Northeastern University in Boston, and Yates is a professor in the department of cell biology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla and a senior research fellow at Diversa.

Kevin Johnson, chief technology officer of Cambridge Antibody Technology, will leave the company as soon as CAT’s antibody microarray project, which he has been leading since 2001, has been concluded. CAT is currently trying to spin out this microarray project as a separate business.

Eric Jakobsson has become the first director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. He joins NIGMS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a professor in the department of molecular and integrative physiology. In addition, he was a professor at the University of Illinois’ Beckman Institute and a research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Jakobsson holds a BS in chemical engineering from the Columbia University School of Engineering and a PhD in physics from Dartmouth College.

Bernd Seizinger, president and CEO of Martinsried, Germany-based GPC Biotech, has joined the board of directors of Graffinity Pharmaceuticals of Heidelberg, Germany. He holds an MD from the Ludwig Maximilians University and a PhD from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, both located in Munich.