William Rideout's Biography

William Rideout, Principal Scientist/IACUC Chair, AVEO Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

He has been a scientist at AVEO Pharmaceuticals since 2002, when he joined the company, formerly called GenPath, a five months after it was founded by Ron Depinho, Lynda Chin, and Tyler Jacks. At AVEO, William installed the technologies needed to develop the ES cell-chimera cancer model system which became the foundation of the Human Response Prediction platform of AVEO. He has participated in the building, characterization and use of numerous mouse cancer models of lung, breast, liver, colon, melanoma, and pancreas. He learned embryonic stem cell manipulation and techniques of somatic cell nuclear transfer (cloning) while a post-doctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute in Rudolf Jaenisch’s lab. The focus of his studies at the Whitehead were DNA methylation and its participation in imprinted gene control, investigation of properties that contribute to the success of reprogramming of the nucleus during somatic cell nuclear transfer, and finally a technical proof of concept for therapeutic cloning. Previously, a two year post-doctoral fellowship in Azim Surani’s lab at the Wellcome/CRC Institute in Cambridge, UK introduced William to imprinting and mouse developmental biology with an emphasis on the regulatory role of DNA methylation. His post-doctoral studies built upon his doctoral work on DNA methylation as an endogenous mutagen done in Peter Jones’ lab at the USC/Norris Cancer Center.