Exosomes and Circulating Biomarkers Summit 2013 Keynote Speakers

Charles Cantor Chief Scientific Officer, Sequenom Inc Charles Cantor is a founder, and Chief Scientific Officer at SEQUENOM, Inc. He is also founder of SelectX Pharmaceuticals, a drug discovery company based in the Boston area; Retrotope, an anti-aging company; and DiThera, a biotherapeutic company. He is co-director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology at Boston University, and professor emeritus of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Cantor has held positions at Columbia University and University of California at Berkeley, and was also director of the Human Genome Center of the Department of Energy at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. He has published more than 450 peer-reviewed articles, has been granted more than 60 patents. He co-authored a three-volume textbook on Biophysical Chemistry and the first textbook on Genomics: The Science and Technology of the Human Genome Project. He sits on the advisory boards of more than 15 national and international organizations and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Bertrand Jordan Emeritus Research Director, National Centre for Scientific Research Bertrand R Jordan (CNRS emeritus research director), an academic molecular biologist with particular achievements in the field of molecular immunology, is the founder and coordinator of the Marseille-Nice Genopole genomics consortium and counselor to the CoreBio-PACA technical platform organisation. An early contributor to DNA array development since 1995, he is also a consultant for French (Ipsogen), Dutch (PamGene) and Taiwanese (Phalanx, Dr. Chip) microarray companies, that operate in fields ranging from prognostic and predictive expression profiling in breast cancer, to “companion diagnostics” based on multiplex kinase activity measurement, and to efficient bacterial diagnostics in the food industry. He recently coordinated a book, “Microarrays in diagnostics and biomarker development” (Springer, 2012).
Mostafa Ronaghi Senior Vice President And Chief Technology Officer, Illumina Inc Mostafa Ronaghi, Ph.D., joined Illumina in August 2008. As Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, he is responsible for leading internal research and the Illumina accelerator program. Dr. Ronaghi is an experienced entrepreneur and was involved in the start-up of four life sciences companies. In 2007, Ronaghi co-founded Avantome, a privately held sequencing company (acquired by Illumina in 2008). Before this, he co-founded NextBio, a search engine for life science data (acquired by Illumina in 2013). In 2001, Ronaghi co-founded ParAllele Bioscience, which was eventually acquired by Affymetrix, Inc., and was involved in the development and commercialization of highly multiplexed technology for genetic testing. In 1997, he co-founded Pyrosequencing AB, which was renamed to Biotage in 2003, and led the company to a successful initial public offering in June 2000 on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Dr. Ronaghi was a principal investigator at Stanford University from 2002­ until 2008 and focused on the development of novel tools for molecular diagnostic applications. He serves on the board of directors of Clear Labs and BaseHealth. Dr. Ronaghi earned his Ph.D. from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. He holds more than 30 (pending and issued) patents and has written more than 70 peer-reviewed publications in journals and books.
Johan Skog Chief Scientific Officer, Exosome Diagnostics Inc Dr. Skog currently serves as chief scientific officer of Exosome Diagnostics where he is leading the research and development efforts for biofluid diagnostics using exosomes in diseases such as cancer, metabolic and neurodegenerative diseases. He is the primary inventor of Exosome Diagnostics' core technology and, in particular, blood-based genetic diagnostics of cancer. Dr. Skog made the discovery that tumor-shed exosomes (microvesicles) contain genetic information of the tumor. He showed that these microvesicles serve to deliver messages to other cells inducing changes favorable to the proliferation of cancer cells. He demonstrated that these tumor exosomes are released into the bloodstream and that they can be isolated and studied for genetic mutations (Skog et al. Nature Cell Biology 2008; 10: 1470-1476). Prior to the start of the company Exosome Diagnostics, Dr. Skog was working at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School where he was studying the role of tumor stem cells in gliomas and later tumor derived exosomes, including their content of RNA biomarkers and transposable elements such as endogenous retroviruses. He also showed that gene therapy vectors can be incorporated into microvesicles and be used as a “stealth” vector with changed tropisms (Maguire et al. Molecular Therapy 2012 Feb 7). Dr. Skog received his PhD at the Department of Virology, Umea University, Sweden, working on novel gene therapy vectors for treatment of gliomas.