Scientific Advisory Board
David Simmons, PhD, MBA
Chief Scientific Officer, Cellzome
David Simmons, PhD, MBA is Chief Scientific Officer at Cellzome. After a successful academic career at several leading research institutions, including the University of Oxford, David joined SmithKline Beecham and later also Celltech, where he was Director of Research, responsible for the NCE drug discovery pipeline. In his last position, before joining Cellzome, David was Vice President, Inflammation Discovery Research at Wyeth Research in Boston, and co-chair of the Inflammation Therapeutic Area Leadership team. In this function, David was responsible for the delivery of innovative pipeline projects and clinical development candidate drugs for inflammatory diseases. David is currently a grant panel reviewer for the UK's Multiple Sclerosis Society and is a reviewer for the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council, Leukaemia Research Fund, Cancer Research Campaign and Arthritis Research Campaign.
Professor Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas PhD
Dept. Professor of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School and Professeur Collège De France
Professor Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas PhD is a Professor at the Department of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA, which he joined in 1998. He is also a Professor at the Collège De France, Paris, holding the chair of Developmental Biology and Genetics. In 1981 he joined the Yale University faculty where he stayed until 1998. Prof. Artavanis-Tsakonas was a Professor in the Departments of Cell Biology and Biology at Yale where, he also served as the Director of the Biological Sciences Division and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He holds a Masters Degree in Chemistry from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich and a PhD from Cambridge University, England for work carried out at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, corresponding member of the Athens Academy, and a member of the Cambridge Philosophical society. Prof. Artavanis-Tsakonas has co-founded the biotechnology companies Exelixis, Inc., Cellzome, Inc., and Anadys Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He is also co-founder and President of Fondation Santé.
Professor Christopher D. Buckley, MBBS, PhD, MRCP
arc Professor of Rheumatology, MRC Centre for Immune Regulation,
University of Birmingham, UK
Professor Christopher D. Buckley MBBS, PhD, MRCP is arc Professor of Rheumatology at the MRC Centre for Immune Regulation at the University of Birmingham, UK. He qualified in 1990 and was appointed as arc Professor and Honorary Consultant in Rheumatology in 2002. Specialist interests include mechanisms involved in the persistence of inflammation and early inflammatory arthritis. He read biochemistry at University of Oxford (1985) and trained as a doctor at the Royal Free Hospital, London (1990). He achieved Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP) in 1993 during subsequent training in General Medicine at Hammersmith Hospital, London and John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. DPhil (1996) arising from Wellcome Training Fellowship with Professor J. Bell and Dr. D. Simmons at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, Oxford. He undertook rheumatology training with Dr. A. Mowatt and Dr. P. Wordsworth at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Hospital, Oxford. In 1996, he attained a Wellcome Clinician Scientist Fellowship and joined the Department of Rheumatology at the University of Birmingham. In 2000, he became a Senior Lecturer and from 2001 to 2006 was MRC Senior Clinical Fellow, at the MRC Center for Immune regulation.
Professor Sir Philip Cohen, PhD
Director of the Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation Unit, University of Dundee
Professor Sir Philip Cohen received his BSc and PhD (1969) at University College London and then spent two years as a postdoc with Edmond Fischer at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. In 1971 he returned to the UK to become a Faculty member of the University of Dundee, Scotland where he has worked ever since. He has been a Royal Society Research Professor since 1984, Director of the Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation Unit since 1990, and became the President of the British Biochemical Society in 2006. For the past thirty-eight years, Prof. Cohen's major research interest has been to understand the role of protein phosphorylation in cell regulation and human disease. Over this period he has made important contributions to our understanding of the control of glycogen metabolism, the structure and regulation of protein phosphatases, MAP kinase cascades and insulin signal transduction. Professor Cohen has received numerous awards for his research contributions, was elected a Fellow of both The Royal Society of London and The Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1984 and was knighted by the Queen in 1998.
Professor Emilio Hirsch, PhD
Professor of Applied Biology, Center for Molecular Biotechnology, University of Torino
Professor Emilio Hirsch is Full Professor of Applied Biology at the University of Torino, Center for Molecular Biotechnology. Prof. Hirsch did his undergraduate and postgraduate studies in biology at the University of Torino, Italy. His initial research was concerned with the function of cell adhesion receptors and their ligands in cell culture and during embryogenesis of genetically altered mice. After a postdoctoral fellowship in Prof. Fassler's laboratory at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich, Prof. Hirsch first became Associate Professor and then in 2005 Full Professor at the University of Torino. His work was groundbreaking for the understanding of the role of PI3Kγ, generating both knock-out and genetically modified mice with an inactivated PI3Kγ gene, demonstrating the role of PI3Kγ e.g. in the response of leukocytes to chemotactic agents as well as cardiac contractility.
Harren Jhoti, PhD
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Astex Therapeutics
Harren Jhoti, PhD is one of the founders of Astex Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that discovers and develops small molecule drugs in areas of unmet medical need with a primary focus in oncology. He co-founded Astex in 1999 and was Chief Scientific Officer until November 2007, when he was appointed Chief Executive Officer. He previously led the Structural Biology and Bioinformatics groups at GlaxoWellcome (1991-1999), applying protein structure analysis to drug discovery and was involved in structure-based drug design projects aimed at a variety of therapeutic targets. He received his PhD in Protein Crystallography from Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.
Professor Bernhard Küster, PhD
Professor of Bioanalytics, Technical University Munich
Professor Bernhard Küster holds the Chair for Bioanalytics at the Technical University Munich. Prof. Küster studied Chemistry at the University of Cologne and obtained a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford in 1997 for which he won the Mattauch-Herzog Award of the German Mass Spectrometry Society. He did a postdoc funded by an EMBO long-term fellowship at the EMBL in Heidelberg in the laboratory of Matthias Mann and was later appointed Research Associate Professor at Odense University, Denmark. Between 2000 and 2007, Prof. Küster served in a number of functions at Cellzome, Heidelberg, most recently as Vice President Analytical Sciences and Informatics. Research in his laboratory focuses on the development of affinity-based and quantitative mass spectrometry approaches and their application to functional and chemical proteomics as well as biomarker discovery.
David Middlemiss, PhD
Founder of XaviaPharm, a drug discovery consultancy business
David Middlemiss, PhD is the founder of XaviaPharm, an independent consultancy, which specializes in medicinal chemistry, drug discovery and strategic analysis. Dr. Middlemiss is a medicinal chemist by training and has 35 years experience in major Pharma with Glaxo. He is an inventor on 48 patents and has been involved in the discovery of 10 NCEs that have been taken into clinical development/market. He was formerly International Therapeutic Research Director for cardiovascular diseases where he had accountability for the strategic direction internationally of CV diseases and their associated projects, through lead optimization to clinical 'Proof of Concept' studies. At GSK he briefly served as World-wide Director, Genetics Portfolio where he was accountable for prioritizing the organizations genetics and genomics research programs. Dr. Middlemiss is a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards for Argenta and Fovea and is a co-founder and director of Theradeas Ltd and Pharmadeas Ltd.
Professor David Sabatini, MD, PhD
Principal Investigator, Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research
Professor David Sabatini MD PhD is Principle Investigator and Member of the Whitehead Institute, Associate Professor of Biology of MIT, Senior Associate Member of the Broad Institute and Member of the Cancer Center of MIT. He read Biology at Brown University and studied medicine and a PhD at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is an associate professor of biology at MIT, an associate member at the MIT Center for Cancer Research and an associate member at the Broad Institute. Prof. Sabatini studies the mechanisms that regulate cell growth. Spurred by the discovery of a cellular pathway that helps switch cell growth on and off, research in the Sabatini lab has linked growth to a cell's ability to sense nutrients in its environment This growth-triggering system, known as the TOR pathway, is composed of a complex of proteins that respond to nutrient cues. Sabatini is working to identify TOR pathway components and study how they interact and work. His efforts to understand mammalian TOR at the cellular level have provided a new way to investigate the role nutrients and metabolism play in disease.
Professor Giulio Superti-Furga, PhD
Director, Center of Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
Professor Giulio Superti-Furga is scientific Director and CEO of the Research Center of Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Medical University of Vienna. Prof. Superti Furga performed his undergraduate and graduate studies in molecular biology at the University of Zurich, at Genentech Inc. and at the Institute for Molecular Pathology in Vienna (I.M.P.). He was a post-doctoral fellow and Team Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) until 2004. For several years he served as professor of Biotechnology at the University of Bologna. In 2000, he co-founded Cellzome, where he was a Scientific Director and responsible for the Heidelberg research site. His most significant scientific contributions are the elucidation of basic regulatory mechanisms of tyrosine kinases in human cancers and the discovery of fundamental organization principles of the proteome of higher organisms.
Professor Arthur Weiss, MD, PhD
Ephraim P. Engleman Distinguished Professor of Rheumatology and Professor of Medicine and of Microbiology and Immunology, University of California
Professor Arthur Weiss, MD, PhD is Ephraim P. Engleman Distinguished Professor of Rheumatology and Professor of Medicine and of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco. He received his undergraduate education at the Johns Hopkins University and his MD and PhD degrees at the University of Chicago, where he studied immunology with Frank Fitch. He did postdoctoral work with Jean-Charles Cerottini and Theodore Brunner at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research, Lausanne. After an internship and residency in internal medicine at UCSF, he was a postdoctoral fellow in rheumatology with John Stobo. Prof. Weiss studies the biochemical signal transduction events that control lymphocyte responses. He is interested in the mechanisms involved in signal transduction by the T cell antigen receptor, and how abnormalities in these mechanisms can lead to autoimmune diseases. Prof. Weiss is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Microbiology.
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