Inovio, a biotechnology firm that develops electroporation-based systems for in vivo gene and bio-molecule delivery, said this week that it has appointed David Pyrce as its chief business officer.
Pyrce comes to Inovio from Vical, where he served as vice president of corporate development. Prior to that, he was general partner at Bear Creek Capital Management and served as vice president and senior healthcare analyst at First Security, Van Kasper & Co.
Pyrce, said Inovio, holds a BS in chemistry and biology from Northern Illinois University, and received an MBA in financial management from the Stuart School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Scott Rocklage has joined 5AM Ventures, an early-stage biotechnology venture capital firm, as a partner. The fund, based in Menlo Park, Calif, is sponsored by Versant Ventures, and Bay City Capital, and was spun out of the latter with a $25 million round of financing in September 2002.
Rocklage comes to 5AM from Cubist Pharmaceuticals, where he has been CEO since 1994, and where he is currently chairman. He is also chairman of Miikana Therapeutics and Symyx Therapeutics, and serves on the board of directors at MDS Proteomics. Before joining Cubist, Rocklage was CEO of Nycomed Salutar, and served as CEO and chairman of Nycomed Interventional. He previously held R&D positions at Salutar and Catalytica. Rocklage has a BS in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Robert Rosenthal has been appointed president and CEO of TekCel, a Hopkinton, Mass., liquid handling and sample management tools company.
Rosenthal was formerly president of PerkinElmer’s instrument’s division, which the company folded in with its life sciences division a year ago.
Prior to that, Rosenthal was president and CEO of Thermo Optek, an instrument company that went public in 1996. Before that, he was president of Nicolet Instrument, a subsidiary of Thermo Instruments.
Rosenthal replaces Herbert Hooper, who is an operating partner at Ampersand Ventures, the lead investor in the company, and was serving as interim CEO of TekCel since August 2003.
Shou-Wei Ding, associate professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Riverside, is scheduled to give a talk entitled RNA Silencing —A Conserved Antiviral Immunity of Plants and Animals at the University of California, Davis next week.
Ding has authored numerous papers on gene silencing that have been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals such as Science, EMBO, and the Journal of Virology.
He holds a PhD in plant molecular biology from Australian National University and a MS in plant virology from Fudan University.
The talk is set for October 27 at UC, Davis’ Health Sciences Complex. The event is being sponsored by the department of medical microbiology and immunology of UC, Davis’ School of Medicine.
For details about Ding’s presentation, go to www.dbs.ucdavis. edu/seminars/?6239.