Medicine
| Arthur D. Levison, the former CEO of Genentech and now the head of the Google-backed age research company Calico, has announced that the prominent medical and biotech researchers Dr. Hal Barron, Dr. Robert Cohen, Cynthia Kenyon and David Botstein will join him at Calico. |
Google’s new high-profile anti-aging startup, Calico, has already generated a lot of interest hand has even made the cover of Time magazine. Now it has recruited a few high profile names in biomedical research to its ranks, including Hal Barron, the chief medical officer and head of global product development at Roche/Genentech, as well as Princeton geneticist David Botstein.
Calico CEO Arthur D. Levinson, one of the most respected names in the biotechnology industry, made the announcement recently in a posting from his Google Plus account.
"Just over two months ago Larry [Page] and I launched Calico," Levinson wrote. "We said then that with the right goals, culture and people, we believe we can make good progress on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of staying youthful, healthy and disease-free for a longer time."
Calico's newest personnel are individuals from the fields of medicine, drug development, molecular biology and genetics: Hal V. Barron, M.D., David Botstein, Ph.D., Robert Cohen, M.D. and Cynthia Kenyon, Ph.D.
Hal Barron is one of the most respected clinician-scientists and successful drug developers in the biotechnology industry. Hal will join us as President, Research and Development. Hal was most recently Executive Vice President, Head of Global Product Development and Chief Medical Officer of Hoffmann-La Roche. There he was responsible for all the products in the combined portfolio of Roche and Genentech. Barron joined Genentech in 1996 as a clinical scientist. During the next several years, he held positions of increasing responsibility and leadership within Cardiovascular Research and Specialty Therapeutics. In 2002 Barron was promoted to vice president, Medical Affairs. In 2003 he became the senior vice president of Development and in 2004 he was appointed chief medical officer. In 2003 he became the senior vice president of Development. In 2004 he was appointed chief medical officer and in 2009 he was appointed executive vice president.
Prior to joining Genentech, Barron received his Bachelor of Science in physics from Washington University in St. Louis, his Medical Degree from Yale University and completed his training in medicine and cardiology at the University of California San Francisco. Barron’s academic positions include Associate Adjunct Professor at the University of California, San Francisco. He has been issued several patents for his work in thrombosis and angiogenesis and has published more than 90 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
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Botstein contributed to the discovery of transposons in bacteria and an understanding of their physical and genetic properties. He devised genetic methods to study the eukaryotic cytoskeleton in yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), notably general ways of detecting gene interactions. In 1980 he made theoretical contributions to human genetics by suggesting, with collaborators, a way to map human disease genes with DNA polymorphisms called restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs). This became a cornerstone of the new science of genomics. He later founded the Saccharomyces Genome Database (with J. Michael Cherry) and applied DNA microarray technology (with Patrick O. Brown) to study genome-wide gene expression, notably defining thereby clinically significant subtypes of human tumors. Most recently, he has been devising and using genome-scale methods for studying system-level regulation of gene expression and gene interactions. At Princeton, Botstein established a new introductory science curriculum that combines biology, physics, chemistry, and computer science.
Bob Cohen will be joining as a Calico Fellow, in a role that will span R&D and Business Development. Bob was most recently Senior Oncology Fellow at Genentech. Bob joined Genentech’s Research organization in 1994 from University of California, San Francisco, where he trained in hematology and oncology and served as Assistant Professor in Residence in the Cancer Research Institute. During his first decade at Genentech, Bob participated in leadership roles that contributed to the development of several of the company's ground-breaking cancer drugs. He joined Business Development full-time in 2004 and was appointed Senior Oncology Fellow in 2008. Over the past several years he has focused on the development of antibody-drug conjugates, a means of delivering targeted chemotherapy to tumors. He is an inventor of nine issued U.S. patents.
Bob has a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from Amherst College and an M.D. with Distinction in Research from the University of Rochester. He completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Michigan and is board-certified in internal medicine, hematology and oncology.
Cynthia Kenyon is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the molecular biology and genetics of aging and life extension, and will be joining Calico as Senior Scientific Advisor. In 1993, Cynthia’s pioneering discovery that a single-gene mutation could double the lifespan of healthy, fertile C. elegans roundworms sparked an intensive study of the molecular biology of aging. Her findings showed that, contrary to popular belief, aging does not “just happen” in a completely haphazard way. Instead, aging is a regulated process controlled by specific genes. Using C. elegans, she has now discovered many evolutionarily-conserved life-extending genes and pathways. In particular, her findings have led to the realization that a universal hormone-signaling pathway influences the rate of aging in many species, including humans.
Cynthia graduated valedictorian in chemistry from the University of Georgia in 1976. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in 1981 and was a postdoctoral fellow with Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner in Cambridge, England. Since 1986 she has been at the University of California, San Francisco. Cynthia is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she a former president of the Genetics Society of America. She has received many scientific awards. Currently, she is an American Cancer Society Professor at UCSF, and she directs UCSF’s Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging, positions she will continue, while she joins Calico on a part-time basis.
SOURCE Arthur Levinson
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