Company
Linkage Biosciences is a molecular diagnostics company developing and marketing products that dramatically improve and expedite complex genetic testing. LinkSēq™ is the company's Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) testing product line. HLA testing is used in solid organ and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation as well as pharmacogenomic and autoimmune disease testing and research. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California and has assembled an outstanding management team and scientific staff.
Board of Directors
Zachary C. Antovich
Zachary Antovich is president and CEO of Linkage Biosciences Inc. Prior to this role, he was an executive with Applied Biosystems and has held various positions with both Bio-Rad Laboratories and Life Technologies (later aquired by Invitrogen and now called Life Technologies again). He also lived in Europe where he consulted with Genset SA. Mr. Antovich began his career as a research scientist for Syntex Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Roche) where he developed early methods for RNA analysis from bone.
Rebecca Bishop
Rebecca Bishop is a managment executive with Affymetrix, Inc. (NASDAQ:AFFX), the company that first introduced high density microarray technology to the life sciences marketplace. She has been with Affymetrix for 7 years and previously was the Microarray Marketing Director for MWG Scientific. Ms. Bishop began working in the life sciences space in 1993, holding executive positions with Curtin Matheson Scientific, Baxter, and Bio-Rad Laboratories.
Pascal Villiger
Pascal Villiger is part of the investment team at CalSTRS with responsibility for private equity investments in the venture, buyout and distressed sectors. Before joining CalSTRS, Mr. Villiger spent the last 10 years working as an investment banker focused on providing financial advisory services to corporate clients and the private equity community. Mr. Villiger was most recently an Executive Director with UBS in San Francisco focused on the technology industry. Previously, Mr. Villiger was a Principal with Banc of America Securities within the Technology Investment Banking Group and began his banking career in the Leverage Finance/Financial Sponsor Group.
Peter D. Henig
Peter D. Henig is Managing Partner for Greenhouse Capital Partners. He is an active and experienced venture capitalist and manages a portfolio of life science and cleantech investments. Mr. Henig holds a B.A. in Economics from Georgetown University and an M.A. in Economics and Public Policy from Stanford University.
Scientific Advisory Board
F. Carl Grumet, M.D.
Dr. Grumet is Emeritus Professor of Pathology and Emeritus Director Stanford Histocompatibility Laboratory, Stanford University. He earned his M.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 and received his postgraduate clinical and research training at Stanford and the N.I.H.. Shortly after joining the Stanford Medical School Faculty in 1972, he founded the Stanford University Blood Center and the Stanford University Hospital Transfusion Service and served as the first Director of Stanford's Specialized Center of Research in Transfusion Medicine. He and the late Professor Rose Payne co-directed the Stanford Histocompatibility Laboratory for two decades until her retirement in 1990; thereafter Dr. Grumet was sole Director until his retirement from clinical responsibilities in 2006. He has over 160 scientific research publications to his credit and has served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals in the field of transplant immunology. Included among Dr. Grumet's professional activities has been his membership on numerous councils, boards, and committees in the field of solid organ and stem cell transplantation. Outside of academia, he has also served as a scientific consultant to the International Atomic Energy Agency of the U.N. and several life science companies including Cetus and Sangsat, and he was a co-founder of both Cetus Immune Inc and of Genelabs Technologies Inc.
Clifford Lowell, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Lowell is Professor and Chair Department of Laboratory Medicine, University of California, San Francisco. He received his M.D., Ph.D. degrees from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1986. He completed his training in Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital (1989) and subspecialty training in Hematology/Oncology at UCSF (1993). His post-doctoral research fellowship training was done with Dr. Harold Varmus at UCSF (1989-1995), where Dr. Lowell developed his research interests in tyrosine kinase based signaling mechanisms. Dr. Lowell joined the faculty in the Dept. of Laboratory Medicine in 1995 and served as the Director of Clinical Immunology Laboratory through 2006. Dr. Lowell's group continues to work on a variety of aspects of tyrosine kinases and intracellular signaling in innate immune cells. Dr. Lowell has authored over 110 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts, received the prestigious Scholar Award from the Leukemia/Lymphoma Society, and is a standing member of the N.I.H. Innate Immunity Study Section. In 2006, Dr. Lowell was named Chairman of the Laboratory Medicine at UCSF with overall Departmental responsibility for Clinical Pathology, Transfusion Medicine and diagnostic testing at UCSF.
Radoje Drmanac, Ph.D.
Dr. Drmanac is the Chief Science Officer of Complete Genomics, a high-performance DNA sequencing company whose mission is to dramatically decrease the cost of DNA sequencing for research, drug development, and diagnostic applications. He is one of the leading research scientists in the field of DNA sequencing by hybridization (SBH). In 1994 he co-founded Hyseq (now Nuvelo, NASDAQ:NUVO). As Chief Scientific Officer, he led the effort to discover and patent thousands of genes, which now form the basis of Nuvelo’s drug development pipeline. Prior to Hyseq, he was a group leader at Argonne National Labs from 1991 to 1994 as part of the DOE Human Genome Project. He completed his postdoctoral studies in 1990 in Hans Lehrach’s group at ICRF in London. He received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology in 1988 at Belgrade University for the conception and pioneering development of SBH technology. At the same university he received BS (1981) and MS (1985) degrees in Molecular Biology.
David Ginzinger, Ph.D.
Dr. Ginzinger is Vice President of Genomics Research and Applications at WaferGen Biosystems, a company developing next generation real time PCR technology. Dr. Ginzinger moved to WaferGen from University of California, San Francisco where he was Director of Operations at the Center for Molecular Oncology, Comprehensive Cancer Center. Prior to this role, he was Director of Scientific Operations and Leader of Advanced Scientific Applications at Applied Biosystems (Life Technologies Corp). Dr. Ginzinger has considerable expertise in the areas of gene expression analysis, polymorphism (SNP) detection, and DNA sequencing, most notably in the area of cancer research. He has developed over 1000 assays for clinical and basic research applications.
Business Advisor
Art Robbins
Art Robbins was trained as a chemist. He later founded two successful companies, Robbins Scientific and Art Robbins Instruments. For more than 30 years Art has developed scores of instruments and ancillary products for transplant histocompatiblity and other life science fields. Art's Hydra dispenser was used by the majority of laboratories engaged in the human genome project. His tissue typing products are used by more than 90% of transplant laboratories throughout the world. The Robbins name is a brand itself, and Art continues to build on more than three decades of success in this marketplace.