Claes Wahlestedt's Biography

Claes Wahlestedt, Director, Scripps Research Institute

Claes Wahlestedt, M.D., Ph.D. is Associate Dean for Therapeutic Innovation, Leonard M. Miller Professor (pending) & Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Director of the Center for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI), and a Member of the Hussman Institute for Human Genomics, at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Dr. Wahlestedt, a native of Sweden, earned his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Lund (Sweden). After post-doctoral training at Kyoto University in Japan and at Georgetown University in Washington DC, he took a position as Assistant Professor at the Department of Neurology and Neuroscience, Cornell University Medical College in New York City. In the early 1990s, Dr. Wahlestedt served as (founding) Director of Astra-Zeneca Research Center in Montreal, Canada. In 1997, he was appointed Professor and Department Chair at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm (Sweden) where he founded the Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics in close association with Pharmacia & Upjohn/Pharmacia/Pfizer where he concomitantly held various worldwide R&D leadership positions. In 2005, he joined the new Scripps Research Institute-Florida (Jupiter, FL) as Professor and Director of Neuroscience Discovery. At Scripps, he co-founded CURNA (now OPKO-CURNA), a spin-off company based on his work on up-regulating endogenous proteins. Dr. Wahlestedt's research concerns mammalian transcriptomics, regulatory noncoding RNAs, and small molecule and oligonucleotide therapeutic approaches. He has authored over 200 peer reviewed scientific papers as well as many patents.