The Personalized Medicine Coalition announced that Daryl Pritchard will be its new VP of science policy, in charge of promoting the organization's science-related policies and of raising awareness of precision healthcare issues among policymakers, providers, and patients. Before joining PMC, Pritchard was director of policy research at the National Pharmaceutical Council; director of research programs advocacy and personalized medicine at the Biotechnology Industry Organization; and the director of government affairs for the American Association for Dental Research. Nabsys has appointed Steve Lombardi to president, CEO, and to its board of directors. Previously, he was CEO of Real Time Genomics, and before that he was CEO of Helicos BioSciences. He has also served as senior vice president of Affymetrix and vice president of genetic analysis at Applied Biosystems. Roche said this week that Arthur Levinson has resigned from its board of directors, effective immediately. The drugmaker said Levinson, who was chairman and CEO at Genentech from 1999 to 2014, made the decision to avoid any conflict with his post as CEO at Calico, a Google-backed startup. Levinson has served on Roche's board since 2010. Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute said this week it has named Perry Nisen as its CEO and … Continue reading →

Contact Information Available for logged-in reporters only Newswise The Ebola epidemic could claim hundreds of thousands of lives and infect more than 1.4 million people by the end of January, according to a statistical forecast released this week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC forecast supports the drastically higher projections released earlier by a group of scientists, including epidemiologists with the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, who modeled the Ebola spread as part of a National Institutes of Health-sponsored project called Midas, short for Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study. The effort is also supported by the federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Before the scientists released results, the outbreak in West Africa was expected to be under control in nine months with only about 20,000 total cases. But modeling showed 20,000 people could be infected in just a single month. The predictions could change dramatically if public health efforts become effective, but based on the viruss current uncontrolled spread, numbers of people infected could skyrocket. If the disease keeps spreading as it has been we estimate there could be hundreds of thousands of cases by the end of the year in Liberia alone, said Bryan Lewis, a … Continue reading →