NextBio's Scientific Advisory Board Brings Together Thought-Leaders From Systems Biology, Genomics And Bioinformatics
Cupertino, CA - NextBio, whose innovative knowledge-based discovery platform introduces a new paradigm in the management and interpretation of biological and clinical information, today announced the founding members of its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB): Dr. Leroy Hood, Dr. Ronald Davis, Dr. Mostafa Ronaghi, Dr. Keith Joho, Dr. Nick Tsinoremas and Dr. Saeed Tavazoie. The SAB, which comprises a broad base of scientific experts from academic and industry research settings, will offer guidance to NextBio management in ensuring the biological and clinical relevance of future product development.
Leroy Hood, M.D, Ph.D.: "One of the challenges of the new systems biology paradigm is how to enable scientists to easily sift through vast quantities of large-scale information that cannot be easily captured in published literature and, at the same time, organize and integrate different types of data in ways that are conducive to computational analysis and modeling. NextBio has made striking progress toward that objective."
Dr. Hood is President and co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington. He has been at the forefront of scientific discovery and technological research for more than 35 years. Dr. Hood has published more than 600 peer-reviewed papers, received 12 patents, co-founded nearly a dozen companies and was awarded the 2002 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for his outstanding contributions to biotechnology and medical technology.
Ronald Davis, Ph.D.: "What NextBio is doing for biological information is analogous to what happened when we went from northern blots to microarrays."
Dr. Davis is the Director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center and Professor of Biochemistry and Genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a world-renowned researcher in the areas of genomics and high-throughput biochemical techniques. He pioneered many of the early techniques using recombinant DNA and helped conceive of novel methods for genetic linkage analysis. Professor Davis has also been involved in the spin-off of multiple start-up companies in the area of genomics from his laboratory at Stanford.
Mostafa Ronaghi, Ph.D.: "The systematic collection of information provides the backbone of biology. Any one study is just a piece of the puzzle in an ocean of pieces. NextBio connects the pieces of the puzzle, revealing new insights into biological systems."
Dr. Ronaghi is co-founder of NextBio and an experienced entrepreneur. He co-founded Pyrosequencing in 1997 (renamed to Biotage in 2003) and ParAllele BioScience in 2001 (sold to Affymetrix). He is currently a principal investigator at Stanford University focusing on developing novel tools for molecular diagnostics. Dr. Ronaghi holds more than 20 pending and issued patents and has written more than 50 peer-reviewed publications in journals and books.
Keith Joho, Ph.D.: "The research community has been looking for a solution like NextBio for the last ten years. It's going to have a huge impact on productivity."
Dr. Joho is a leader in the bioinformatics community having held senior management positions in bioinformatics at Ingenuity Systems, SurroMed, Abgenix, Roche Bioscience and SUGEN. He has also served on the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Louisiana State University Medical Center. He is currently a consultant focusing on informatics challenges in biopharmaceutical research.
Nick Tsinoremas, Ph.D.: "NextBio is liberating for bench scientists. It gives them an intuitive way to query across private and curated public data without having to be bioinformatics experts."
Dr. Tsinoremas is a Senior Director of Informatics at Scripps Florida where he oversees data analysis systems ranging from statistical genetics and data mining to chemo-informatics and sequence-based analysis. Previously, Dr. Tsinoremas held senior positions in computational genomics and bioinformatics at Rosetta/Merck, DoubleTwist, Incyte Genomics and Progenitor. Dr. Tsinoremas' original research includes light-regulated gene expression and circadian rhythms.
Saeed Tavazoie, Ph.D.: "NextBio's intuitive platform allows the biologist to navigate through the astronomical number of hypotheses that modern datasets make possible. This is the first step in turning mountains of data into new discoveries."
Dr. Tavazoie is a professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. He has done pioneering research in the areas of computational biology and functional genomics. Professor Tavazoie has broad cross-disciplinary expertise in biophysics, molecular biology, genomics, computational biology, and medicine. His current research is aimed at developing new conceptual frameworks for extracting biological understanding from large experimental datasets.
"NextBio's goal is to remove informatics barriers that have impeded biopharmaceutical research for years, and that goal is founded on a philosophy of innovation", said Saeid Akhtari, president, CEO and co-founder of NextBio. "This is clearly a philosophy we share with each member of our Scientific Advisory Board. We are honored to be working with this distinguished group of scientists."
SOURCE: NextBio