Category Archives: Pharmacogenomics

Fluidigm has tapped Dan Clutter as North American sales director for its eastern sales region. He will be responsible for sales growth in the eastern US and Canada and will be a member of Fluidigm's North American commercial leadership team, according to a spokesperson. Clutter joins Fluidigm from Gentel Biosciences, where he had served as vice president of commercial development since 2009. Before that, he was vice president of sales at NimbleGen Systems, now Roche NimbleGen.

Knome has added some new faces to its executive team, naming Jay Therrien as senior VP and head of global sales, Charles Abdalian as chief financial officer, and Adam Rosenberg as senior VP and head of corporate development.

Therrien was VP of commercial operations and sequencing at Life Technologies, and also had spent five years in various sales leadership roles at Illumina. Abdalian recently was senior VP and CFO of Molecular Insight Pharmaceuticals, and he was senior VP of finance and CFO at Coley Pharmaceutical. Rosenberg previously was an adviser for emerging life sciences companies, co-founder of Clean Membranes, and CEO of Link Medicine.

The company also has appointed Hugh Reinhoff to serve on its scientific advisory board. Reinhoff is currently a managing director of Life Science Venture Partners, an adjunct scientist at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, and CEO of FerroKin BioSciences.

Excerpt from:
Downloads & Upgrades: Roche's 454 Software, Omixon Simulation Service, OmicsOffice, and Others

Fluidigm has tapped Dan Clutter as North American sales director for its eastern sales region. He will be responsible for sales growth in the eastern US and Canada and will be a member of Fluidigm's North American commercial leadership team, according to a spokesperson. Clutter joins Fluidigm from Gentel Biosciences, where he had served as vice president of commercial development since 2009. Before that, he was vice president of sales at NimbleGen Systems, now Roche NimbleGen.

Knome has added some new faces to its executive team, naming Jay Therrien as senior VP and head of global sales, Charles Abdalian as chief financial officer, and Adam Rosenberg as senior VP and head of corporate development.

Therrien was VP of commercial operations and sequencing at Life Technologies, and also had spent five years in various sales leadership roles at Illumina. Abdalian recently was senior VP and CFO of Molecular Insight Pharmaceuticals, and he was senior VP of finance and CFO at Coley Pharmaceutical. Rosenberg previously was an adviser for emerging life sciences companies, co-founder of Clean Membranes, and CEO of Link Medicine.

The company also has appointed Hugh Reinhoff to serve on its scientific advisory board. Reinhoff is currently a managing director of Life Science Venture Partners, an adjunct scientist at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, and CEO of FerroKin BioSciences.

Read the original:
Convey, CLC Bio to Provide Combined Software, Hardware NGS Data-Analysis Solution

Fluidigm has tapped Dan Clutter as North American sales director for its eastern sales region. He will be responsible for sales growth in the eastern US and Canada and will be a member of Fluidigm's North American commercial leadership team, according to a spokesperson. Clutter joins Fluidigm from Gentel Biosciences, where he had served as vice president of commercial development since 2009. Before that, he was vice president of sales at NimbleGen Systems, now Roche NimbleGen.

Knome has added some new faces to its executive team, naming Jay Therrien as senior VP and head of global sales, Charles Abdalian as chief financial officer, and Adam Rosenberg as senior VP and head of corporate development.

Therrien was VP of commercial operations and sequencing at Life Technologies, and also had spent five years in various sales leadership roles at Illumina. Abdalian recently was senior VP and CFO of Molecular Insight Pharmaceuticals, and he was senior VP of finance and CFO at Coley Pharmaceutical. Rosenberg previously was an adviser for emerging life sciences companies, co-founder of Clean Membranes, and CEO of Link Medicine.

The company also has appointed Hugh Reinhoff to serve on its scientific advisory board. Reinhoff is currently a managing director of Life Science Venture Partners, an adjunct scientist at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, and CEO of FerroKin BioSciences.

Link:
People in the News: Josh LaBaer in as New President of US HUPO and More

DURHAM -- Dr. Gary Lyman was drawn into cancer research by the allure of finding a cure for a killer disease.

But he has found acclaim in a less splashy, yet equally vital arena making sure the tools used to treat cancer are put to their best use.

The Duke doctor and researcher has played a key role in establishing guidelines for cancer treatments, both as an adviser to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and a leader in the countrys major oncology association.

He co-chaired a panel that earlier this month found that obese breast cancer patients are often not given full doses of cancer drugs, which likely contributes to their higher death rates. The researchers from the American Society of Clinical Oncology recommended that all patients receive doses based on their weight and height, a practice many doctors have shied away from for fear of serious side effects from large doses of toxic drugs.

The change will impact an oncologists daily practice and could save thousands of lives a year. Its a good example of Lymans focus on research that can be put into practice quickly, says Dr. Jeffrey Crawford, chief of the division of medical oncology at Duke Medicine.

A lot of the breakthroughs that we see come from clinical trials and we think weve made advances, but those advances dont really happen until they get translated into the community, Crawford said. Hes really trying to do work that improves the care of patients right away.

Earlier this year, the FDA panel Lyman serves on made a controversial decision not to approve the drug Avastin for use in breast cancer patients because of concerns about the drugs effectiveness and side effects. He has also done research on minimizing blood clots during cancer treatment, a problem so common that it was largely dismissed as inevitable.

Lymans research fits in well with a current emphasis on practicality when it comes to cancer treatments, says Dr. Howard McLeod, an expert in analyzing cancer treatments at UNC-Chapel Hill. As hopes for a single magic bullet cure have faded, maximizing the effectiveness of existing treatments has become a major research focus.

Were at the point where we have a lot of patients and we dont know if theyre being best served, said McLeod, director of the UNC Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy. Lyman has been one of the first to really grab onto this idea that weve got to take the complex science and make it practical.

Cancer hits home

Original post:
Doctor’s role is key to cancer fight

By Matt Jones

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) The National Human Genome Research Institute plans to fund more new research projects that explore how to best use genome sequencing in clinical care, as well as the ethical, legal, and social implications of using that genomic information in the clinic.

After receiving a strong response from the research community to its Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research program, which funded several new projects late last year, the institute plans to renew the funding call sometime late this spring, NHGRI Program Director Brad Ozenberger told GenomeWeb Daily News on Thursday.

"We had a really strong response to [the first] RFA," he said. "There's a real interest in this area in the community, so we decided to reissue the RFA and expand this consortium. We expected that there would be a good response, but it exceeded our expectations. There is just a lot of activity right now with next-gen sequencing and trying to move some of those technologies into medical care, so this RFA really hit a hot button."

The CSER program was designed to support multi-disciplinary studies involving clinicians, bioinformaticians, and ethicists to explore through specific projects the challenges, opportunities, and ethical questions related to using genome sequence data in clinical care. The research should address critical questions about how to apply genomic sequencing to clinical care in individual cases, "from generation of genomic sequence data, to interpretation and translation of the data for the physician," NHGRI said in a notice about its plans to fund more CSER awards.

Each of these projects are to include three components: a clinical genomics study; a sequencing, analysis, and interpretation of sequence data project; and a study of some of the ethical, legal, economic, and psychosocial implications of using genomic information to diagnose and treat real patients. NHGRI sees these projects as more than studies of specific diseases and their care, but foremost as efforts to evaluate how sequencing can be used in medical practice more broadly.

"The point of the program is not to solve those diseases or discover new disease association alleles, but it is really about the process. So the breadth of approaches in disease areas is going to help us in that area," Ozenberger explained.

Last December, NHGRI granted $40 million to fund the first five CSER projects. These included a project to use and evaluate whole-exome sequencing as a diagnostic tool in searching for genetic errors that may be linked to patients' eating disorders, a study that will use genome and exome sequence data alongside ELSI surveys to study commonalities between colon cancer patients, and an effort to use sequencing and analysis with genetic counseling to study patients with disorders that cannot be easily diagnosed, among others.

These awards primarily went to research universities and institutes with a history of conducting basic genomics research, such as Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Washington, but also went to the large clinical research centers of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

"NHGRI historically has been much more focused on basic research, but with our new strategic direction of moving into genomic medicine, we did have a lot of applicants who are not the typical people we work with at NHGRI," Ozenberger said.

Continue reading here:
NHGRI Plans to Fund More Clinical Sequencing Projects

Cancer is an ever-morphing collection of diseases, making understanding its inner workings complicated. This year, as always, many 'omics researchers have taken up the challenge to elucidate cancer a little bit further. For our 8th annual cancer issue, Genome Technology highlights advances and insights gleaned by researchers during the past year. New tools like those of synthetic biology are being put to use trying to rein cancer in. Drug delivery could be mediated by cell surface proteins, Harvard's George Church tells Christie Rizk in her look into his new DNA nanobot tool to deliver cancer drugs directly to tumors. And more researchers, like the University of Michigan's Arul Chinnaiyan, are combining transcriptome, exome, and whole-genome sequencing data to get a more comprehensive look at tumor type and behavior.

In a roundtable discussion this month, GT speaks with a number of cancer experts about cancer sequencing projects, the need for functional genomics studies, and more, beginning on page 44.

Also in this issue, Tracy Vence discusses how PCR-based and other diagnostic tools are being developed or adapted for point-of-care use. Such tests must be easy to use, and amenable to settings with limited resources to make an impact on patient care.

Elsewhere this month, Christie examines the burgeoning world of pharmacometabolomics. Researchers taking this approach to study drug response aim to bring together the best of pharmacogenomics pinpointing relevant genes and metabolomics integrating environmental effects. In particular, researchers have found that a SNP in the glycine dehydrogenase gene is related to response to SSRIs.

With all these approaches, data analysis is ever the problem. In this month's Brute Force column, Matthew Dublin writes that both academic and industry groups are trying to tame the cloud. Both are working to make cloud computing for data analysis seamless and simple, and Matt provides an update on those efforts.

See more here:
Up to the Task