Exosome Diagnostics announces expansion of scientific advisory board

May 24 2011

Exosome Diagnostics, a leading developer of biofluid based molecular diagnostic tests for use in personalised medicine, today announced the appointments of Bob Carter MD, Carlos Cordon-Cardo MD, PhD, Keith Flaherty MD, John Quackenbush, PhD; to its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB).

Dr Carter is Professor and Chief of Neurosurgery at the University of California, San Diego Medical Center (UCSD) and co-leads the clinical brain tumor program.  He was recruited to UCSD in 2010 from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School where he served on staff since 1992.  Dr. Carter obtained his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Public Health respectively. His post-doctoral training included residency in neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and post-doctoral fellowships at the Whitehead Institute, Cambridge, MA and Children's Hospital, Boston. http://neurosurgery.ucsd.edu/bob-s-carter-md-phd/.   

Dr Cordon-Cardo is Vice Chairman of Pathology and Professor of Pathology and Urology at Columbia University in addition to being Associate Director of Infrastructure at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Cordon-Cardo obtained his M.D. from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, in 1980, and his Ph.D. in Cell Biology and Genetics from Cornell University Medical College in 1985. He has pioneered the development and implementation of an oncologic molecular pathology discipline, and more recently participated in the creation of the "systems pathology" platform. He is internationally recognized for his studies on experimental pathology and molecular oncology, including analyses of multidrug resistance and alterations of tumor suppressor genes in human cancer, mainly those deregulating cell cycle. http://columbiaurology.org/about/researchfaculty/cordon-cardo.html

Dr Flaherty is Director of Developmental Therapeutics at the Massachusettes General Hospital Cancer Center and a Lecturer in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is also involved in research programs in cutaneous oncology, melanoma, translational pharmacology and early therapeutic trials. Dr. Flaherty's research focuses on the understanding of novel, molecularly targeted therapies in cancer. In this context he focused on the development of response and predictive biomarkers to define the mechanisms of action and resistance of novel therapies, as well as to identify the optimal target population.  He served as principal investigator for the first-in-human clinical trials of the first prospectively developed selective BRAF inhibitors, RAF-265 and PLX403. http://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/membership/profile/member/1632/0/

Dr Quackenbush is Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the Dana-Faber Cancer Institute, Harvard. Dr. Quackenbush completed a Ph.D. in theoretical physics followed by a two-year postdoctoral position in experimental particle physics and phenomenology. Currently, Dr. Quackenbush is focused on research projects that include the identification of expression fingerprints and genomic alterations that are relevant to colon and breast tumor metastasis, the development of novel computational approaches for the interpretation of large-scale datasets and methods for data integration to facilitate gene discovery. http://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/membership/profile/member/60/0/

About Exosome Diagnostics

Exosome Diagnostics is a leading developer of biofluid based molecular diagnostic tests for use in personalized medicine. Exosomes are shed into all biofluids, including blood, urine, and CSF, forming a highly enriched source of intact, disease-specific nucleic acids. The Company’s proprietary exosome technology makes use of this natural enrichment to achieve high sensitivity and specificity for rare gene transcripts and the expression of genes responsible for cancers and other diseases. The Company is commercializing in vitro diagnostic tests for use in companion diagnostic applications and real-time monitoring of disease. The Company maintains facilities in New York, NY, St. Paul, MN  and Munich, Germany and is backed by an international consortium of leading venture capitalists. For more information, please visit www.exosomedx.com.