Scientific and Clinical Advisors
Todd Golde, MD, PhD
Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville
Todd E. Golde, MD, PhD, is a Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Neuroscience at Mayo Clinic Jacksonville. His research over the past 12 years has focused on the role of the amyloid b protein (Ab) in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). During his training as an MD PhD student in the laboratory of Steve Younkin, Dr. Golde and colleagues showed that Ab was a normally derived product of the amyloid b protein precursor (APP), and later he played a major role in studies showing that mutant forms of the APP alter processing of the APP in manner that is likely to drive Ab aggregation and accumulation in the AD brain. After receiving his MD and PhD degrees from Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Golde completed a clinical residency in Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. After his residency Dr. Golde joined the Department of Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor, and two years later joined the Neurodegenerative Research group in Mayo Clinic Jacksonville. His current research is focused on understanding the mechanism by which different Ab peptides are made, pursuing ways in which Ab metabolism can be pharmacologically manipulated, and trying to understand how Ab deposition leads to neuronal dysfunction and death.
Franz Hefti, PhD
Executive Vice President, Drug Development
Rinat Neuroscience Corp.
Before joining Rinat, Dr. Hefti was senior vice president of Neuroscience Research at Merck & Co. for eight years where he coordinated the company's neuroscience research worldwide, serving as site head for the their neuroscience research centers in the U.K. and San Diego. During his tenure there, compounds covering ten different drug targets in the neuroscience area were taken into development. Prior to Merck & Co., Dr. Hefti was director of the Neuroscience Research Department at Genentech for three years. Prior to Genentech, he spent ten years in academia as a professor at the University of Southern California and associate professor at the University of Miami. He published over 200 papers on neurotrophic factors and topics in neuropharmacology, as well as a textbook on the drug discovery for nervous system diseases. Dr. Hefti received his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich and did his postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich.
Eliezer Masliah, MD
University of California, San Diego
Dr. Eliezer Masliah received his MD from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1983. After obtaining his MD, he went on to obtain his specialty in Pathology at the National Institutes of Health in Mexico City in 1986. From 1987-1989 he performed postdoctoral studies in Neuropathology and Neurodegeneration at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he became Assistant Professor in Neurosciences and Pathology in 1990 and Full Professor in 1997. He is the Director of the Autopsy Service at UCSD Medical Center since 1995 and the Director of the Laboratory of Experimental Neuropathology at the Neurosciences Department at UCSD since 1994. Dr. Masliah has published over 250 scientific papers and more than 20 book chapters, several of them in journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS and JBC. Dr. Masliah's laboratory was the first to clone the human homologue of alpha-synuclein and to develop a transgenic animal model of Parkinson's disease. His research focus in understanding the mechanisms of synaptic damage in neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and HIV dementia. More recently his research has focused in developing new treatments for these disorders.
Robert Tibshirani, PhD
Associate Chairman and Professor of Health Research and Policy, and Statistics,
Stanford University
Robert Tibshirani's main interests are in applied statistics, biostatistics and data mining. He is co-author of the books "Generalized Additive Models" (with T. Hastie) "An Introduction to the Bootstrap" (with B. Efron) and "Elements of Statistical Learning" (with T. Hastie and J. Friedman). His current research focusses on problems in biology and genomics, medicine and industry. With collaborator Balasubramanian Narasimhan, he also develops software packages for genomic and proteomics.
Judith Wilber, PhD
Vice President of Technical Operations
XDx, Inc.
Prior to joining XDx, Dr. Wilber gained broad experience in the development and clinical utilization of diagnostic markers. She held several roles at Bayer Healthcare (formerly Chiron Diagnostics), including vice president of research and development in nucleic acid diagnostics, manager of clinical microbiology, associate director of research and director of the Bayer Reference Testing Laboratories, where she established in-house clinical reference laboratories in the United States and Europe.With more than 25 years experience in the field, she is a renowned expert in diagnostic testing and monitoring. Dr. Wilber is also an assistant clinical professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Wilber received her Ph.D. and Master of Science in microbiology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. She has a certificate of qualification as a laboratory director in virology and immunology and is a certified public health microbiologist and a licensed clinical microbiologist scientist.
Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD
Co-Founder
Dr. Wyss-Coray is Assistant Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University. He has a PhD in Immunology from the University of Bern, Switzerland and has been at Stanford since 2002. He conducts research to understand how nerve cells degenerate with aging and disease and how the brain reacts to this neurodegeneration with a special emphasis on Alzheimer's disease. The research hopes to arrive at a better understanding of the role of aging and genetic or environmental factors to design more effective therapeutics.
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