Management

Dale E. Johnson, Pharm.D., Ph.D., President & Chief Executive Officer.  Dale Johnson has over 25 years of experience in biotechnology and pharmaceutical research and development activities where he has led and managed groups ranging from small units in start-up companies to multi-national units in large companies. He has participated in the research and development of over 100 compounds of which 15 have become marketed health care medicinal products in the United States and Europe. He is considered an expert in transitioning research projects into drug candidates. He has served in executive and R&D positions in Chiron Corp., Eos Biotechnology, American Cyanamid (Lederle), International Research & Development Corp., and Hoechst Roussel Pharmaceuticals.  He is co-editor of the journal The Chemistry of Metabolic and Toxicological Processes, Current Opinion in Drug Discovery & Development and is an Adjunct Professor in Molecular Toxicology at University of California, Berkeley. He did his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Michigan where he was an AFPE Fellow in Toxicology.

Sucha Sudarsanam, M.S., Chief Scientific Officer.  Over the last 15 years, Sucha Sudarsanam has become internationally recognized as a leader in the bioinformatics field. Most recently he was head of R&D Informatics at Chiron Corp. where he led the creation of an informatics infrastructure for translational medicine, integrating discovery and clinical systems. Previously he led the bioinformatics department at Sugen and was Global Director of Bioinformatics at Pharmacia where he was noted for seminal work on the human kinome. He also worked as a scientist at Immunex, Aeiveos Sciences, and BA Frenz & Associates. He is a graduate of The American College, Madurai, India and received an M.S. in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology. He completed additional graduate work at SUNY, Buffalo.

Edwin P. Ching, J.D., Ph.D., Vice President, Intellectual Property.  Edwin Ching has more than 17 years of legal experience working with biotechnology companies and a leading law firm. Most recently he was Patent Counsel for Gangagen Inc and V.P., Intellectual Property at Eos Biotechnology. Previously he held legal positions at Berlex Biosciences and DNAX Research Institute and was a Law Associate at Townsend & Townsend.  He has extensive experience in patent filings and prosecution both in US and overseas. He received an A.B. in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Neurobiology from California Institute of Technology, and a J.D. from Columbia University Law School. He completed post-doctoral research at Rockefeller University in Cell and Molecular Biology.

Henry C. Settle, Jr., M.B.A., C.P.A., Chief Financial Officer.  Hank Settle has been a principal and a financial consultant with life sciences and technology companies.  At Ernst & Young, he served as a partner in the firm’s life sciences practice in Palo Alto, where he led teams serving approximately 40 emerging companies in the biotechnology and medical device fields, many of which were public companies. He began his career in E&Y’s San Diego office in 1974 and was promoted to Partner in the Tokyo office where he served as technical advisor to multi-national companies and was a member of the firm’s international mergers and acquisitions network. Subsequent to E&Y, he was Chief Financial Officer of SuperGen, Inc., a public biotechnology company.  He also served as a financial consultant for Affymetrix, Theravance, Inc., and E-Convergent, assisting with IPOs, other financial projects, and the design and implementation of internal business systems.  Most recently he was Chief Financial Officer of KineMed, Inc., a privately-owned biotechnology company.  He holds an M.B.A. in Finance from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

James Burden, J.D., Chief Business Officer.  Jim Burden has over 35 years of experience in private law practice in San Francisco along with corporate finance and business operations. He has co-founded, financed, and operated a number of companies, many of which are in the bioscience area.  He was a co-founding director and for the past four years was the Chief Operations Officer of KineMed, Inc. He is President and majority owner of Dorset Capital, LLC, a company that facilitates the formation and financing of companies both in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom.  He was a co-founding director and officer of EuroGen Pharmaceuticals Ltd., a U.K. a company formed to seek European regulatory approvals to market the oncology drug portfolio of a U.S.-based, NASDAQ listed company.  He received a B.S. degree from the School of Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley (Haas School of Business), a J.D. degree from the University of California, Hastings College of Law, and did post-J.D. studies at the Graduate School of Law, University of Southern California.

Patent and Legal Counsel:  Vern Norviel and Jon Layman of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Palo Alto, CA.

Scientific Advisory Board

Bahija Jallal, Ph.D.  Bahija Jallal is Vice President, Translational Sciences at MedImmune, Inc. where she leads the preclinical and clinical biomarker functions and also directs the toxicology/pathology, clinical assays and in vivo/ex vivo biology efforts. Previously she was Vice President of Translational Sciences and Translational Medicine at Chiron Corporation.  Prior to Chiron, Dr. Jallal worked at Sugen, Inc. where she held positions of increasing responsibility in cancer target discovery, signal transduction, and kinase biology.  Dr. Jallal received a master's degree in biology from the Universite de Paris VII in France, and her doctorate in physiology from the University of Pierre & Marie Curie in Paris. She conducted her postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany.

Manoj C. Desai, Ph.D.  Manoj Desai has been Vice President, Medicinal Chemistry at Gilead Sciences since 2003. Previously he was Divisional Vice President of Research at Chiron from 1994 to 2003, where he was functional head of chemistry.  His areas of leadership have included medicinal chemistry, chemical informatics, computational chemisty, protein X-ray crystallography, combinatorial chemistry, analytical chemistry and bioorganic chemistry.  Prior to Chiron, he was a medicinal chemist for seven years at Pfizer Central Research.  He received his Ph.D. from M.S. University of Baroda in Natural Products with Dr. Sukh Dev.  Dr. Desai was a Post Doctoral Fellow in the laboratories of Professor Herbert C. Brown and Professor E.J. Corey.  He is a section editor for Annual Report in Medicinal Chemistry and Current Opinion in Drug Discovery and Development.

Sean Ekins, Ph.D., D.Sc.  Sean Ekins is Senior Vice President of Computational Biology at Arnold Consultancy and Technology LLC, where he consults for several companies in the areas of computational drug discovery, systems biology applied to pathway and biomarker discovery, and in vitro and computational ADME/Tox.  Previously he was Vice President of Computational Biology at GeneGo where he developed MetaDrug, a software product for drug metabolism and toxicity assessment widely used in the pharmaceutical industry.  Prior to GeneGo, he was Associate Director of Computational Drug Discovery at Concurrent Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (now Vitae Pharmaceuticals) and a senior scientist in drug disposition at Lilly Research Laboratories and Pfizer.  Dr. Ekins received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Aberdeen and was recently awarded a D.Sc. in science from the University of Aberdeen.  After his Ph.D., he completed postdoctoral studies at Lilly Research Laboratories in Drug Disposition where he applied in vitro and computational pharmacophore methods to cytochrome P450s.  He is an Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Pharmacy Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Maryland and is editor of the book "Computer Applications for Pharmaceutical Research and Development" for Wiley.  He is also Associate Editor of the Journal of Pharmacological and Toxicological Methods and on the Editorial Boards of Drug Metabolism and Disposition, Drug Discovery Today, and Pharmaceutical Research.