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Deciphera's Scientific Advisory Board
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Deciphera Pharmaceuticals Scientific Advisory BoardThe Scientific Advisory Board consists of Ernest Brahn, MD (UCLA School of Medicine), Dr. John McCall (PharMac LLC), Professor Russ Middaugh (University of Kansas), Dr. Judith Sebolt-Leopold (Oncovera Therapeutics), Professor Rick Van Etten (Tufts-NEMC), and Dr. Michael Rafferty (VP Preclinical Development) External Advisors Ernest Brahn, MD is Professor of Medicine, in the Division of Rheumatology, at the UCLA School of Medicine. He received his MD degree with Honors from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and did his Internal Medicine Residency at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco. He then completed a 3-year Rheumatology/Immunology research fellowship at Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and continued on as a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty prior to joining UCLA in 1986. Dr. Brahn runs a biomedical research laboratory in molecular immunology as well as a clinical research program primarily interested in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. At the UCLA Medical Center he is the Chair of the Clinical Laboratories Executive Committee and Director of the Rheumatology Training Program. Dr. Brahn has authored numerous biomedical publications and has served on the Editorial Board or as a scientific reviewer for 39 journals and organizations. He has worked in many capacities for the American College of Rheumatology, most recently a 3-year term as the Web Editor and Chair of the Electronic Technologies Committee, Chair of the National Scientific Abstract Selection Committee (Rheumatoid Arthritis - Animal Models), as well as Advisory Editor of Arthritis & Rheumatism. Dr. John M. McCall has 33 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. He began his career as a medicinal chemist with Upjohn and has subsequently held positions with Pharmacia & Upjohn, Pharmacia, and Pfizer. John was global head of chemistry for both Pharmacia & Upjohn and Pharmacia. Prior to this, he was head of Upjohn's CNS unit. At Pfizer, as a vice president in the research organization, John worked on chemistry and technology globalization, research strategy, outsourcing, and cheminformatics. John left Pfizer to form PharMac LLC in early 2005. He currently serves on steering committees for NINDS and the muscular dystrophy CNRG group and on boards or SABs of both domestic and global pharmaceutical companies. Professor Russell C. Middaugh is the Aya & Takeru Higuchi Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS. Professor Middaugh research efforts involve the development of vehicles to deliver polynucleotides for gene therapy, the use of physical methods such as infrared spectroscopy, circular dichroism, fluorescence, light-scattering, calorimetry and related techniques to characterize viral and nonviral gene delivery complexes, the study of cellular barriers to vehicle transport and the preparation of novel gene delivery systems. Dr. Judith S. Sebolt-Leopold is Chief Scientific Officer and a founder of Oncovera Therapeutics, Ann Arbor, MI. Judy received her education at Wellesley College (BA in Biology) and Purdue University (Ph.D. in Biological Sciences). After a post-doctoral fellowship in experimental oncology at Indiana University School of Medicine, she started her pharmaceutical career in 1984 when she joined Parke-Davis/Warner-Lambert. Shortly after the merger of Warner-Lambert and Pfizer, Judy was appointed head of the newly created Cancer Molecular Sciences department. She pioneered and championed the viability of MEK inhibitors from early discovery through oncology clinical development that resulted in high commercial interest across the pharmaceutical industry. In her most recent position at Pfizer, she served as Executive Director of Mechanistic & Target Biology, a department of over 100 colleagues with responsibility for molecular pharmacology, biomarker discovery, and assay technology development for multiple therapeutic areas. Since leaving Pfizer in 2007, Judy has remained active in consulting for pharmaceutical companies on the discovery and development of small molecules targeting signal transduction pathways. She serves as a senior editor of Molecular Cancer Therapeutics and has a publication record that includes over sixty-five invited reviews and peer-reviewed articles. Professor Richard Van Etten received an MD and PhD in Biophysics from Stanford University School of Medicine, where he worked with David Clayton on molecular genetics of mammalian mitochondrial DNA. After postgraduate training in internal medicine and hematology at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston, he was a postdoctoral fellow with David Baltimore at the Whitehead Institute. He was a faculty member in the Departments of Genetics and Medicine at Harvard Medical School until 2003, when he joined MORI as Professor of Medicine and Director of Hematologic Malignancies. Internal Advisors Dr. Michael F. Rafferty is Vice President of Preclinical Development. Michael obtained his Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry from the University of Kansas under Professor Gary Grunewald. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the NIH with Dr. Kenner Rice, Mike joined the medicinal chemistry department at Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After moving briefly to Bristol-Myers in Wallingford, Ct., Mike joined Searle as Director of CNS Diseases research, where he was responsible for directing discovery programs targeting pain management, neurological disorders, and GI diseases. Mike returned to Parke-Davis as Director of CNS medicinal chemistry, with responsibilities over a broad range of neuropsychiatric and neurological diseases research programs. Mike also served as the chair of the exploratory development program for pregabalin (Lyrica) from 1993 through 1997. Shortly after the merger of Warner-Lambert and Pfizer, Mike was named Executive Director of the newly created Discovery Technologies department, a group of over 150 colleagues who provided core technology support for all Ann Arbor discovery programs. Other past affiliations include adjunct professor of medicinal chemistry department at the University of Michigan and coeditor-in-chief, Medicinal Research Reviews. Mike is currently adjunct professor, medicinal chemistry, at the University of Kansas and treasurer of the Medicinal and Bioorganic Chemistry Foundation, which he co-founded in 1995. Mike also serves on the editorial board of Molecular Pharmaceutics and has served as ad hoc reviewer for a number of medicinal chemistry and pharmacology journals. Mike is an inventor on 42 issued US patents and co-author on 56 peer-reviewed papers. Since 2005, Mike has consulted with large and small pharmaceutical organizations on various discovery and early development programs. |
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