Deciphera Pharmaceuticals Scientific Advisory Board

The Scientific Advisory Board consists of Dr. John McCall (PharMac LLC), Professor Russ Middaugh (University of Kansas), Dr. Judith Sebolt-Leopold (Oncovera Therapeutics), Professor Rick Van Etten (Tufts-NEMC), Dr. Michael Rafferty (VP Preclinical Development), and Dr. Peter Petillo (Chief Scientific Officer).

External Advisors

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.

Dr. Peter A. Petillo is Senior Vice President & Chief Scientific Officer. Peter received his B.S. degree in chemistry from the University of New Hampshire in 1985 and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1991. He stayed at the University of Wisconsin to pursue postdoctoral studies in the area of high-resolution solution NMR of carbohydrates before moving to the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, MA, where he was a Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Research postdoctoral fellow. In 1994, he moved to the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and spent seven years directing a group of up to 20 students. During this time, the Petillo group developed new paramagnetic contrast agents for MRI imaging that displayed tissue and pathology specificity, initiated the construction of carbohydrate-based dendrimers for the delivery of drugs and diagnostics to non-vascularized type tumors and developed new, reliable and robust synthetic methods for the assembly of bio-active agents including peptides and carbohydrates. His group was the first to demonstrate that carbohydrates fold in solution. In 2001, he moved to NeoGenesis as a Principal Scientist where he was wholly responsible for the construction of their NMR facility and led efforts in affinity-based screening.

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