PHARMACEUTICALS

David Brown

Viagra's co-inventor David Brown, former global head of discovery at Roche Pharma in Basel, Switzerland, was last month appointed president and chief executive of Cellzome, a Heidelberg-based drug-discovery company. Brown, who has worked for four of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies in his 28-year career, became intrigued by Cellzome when researchers at the company, together with co-workers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, elucidated the protein interactions of yeast (A.-C. Gavin et al. Nature 415, 141–147; 2002).

“It hadn't occurred to me that it was possible to do proteomics on that scale,” Brown says. Before that paper was published, he had lectured frequently on why several drug candidates were failing and had concluded that the reason wasn't the number of targets but the shortage of “chemically tractable” ones. Many targets weren't well validated; in other cases, compounds that bound to the targets proved to be toxic to animals or humans. After the paper appeared, he thought: “Maybe these guys have got something that will affect one or two of these issues.” So he visited the company, was impressed with its proteomics technology platform and was convinced that the firm could use its work in yeast to elucidate biochemical pathways in humans.

He aims to expand Cellzome's drug-discovery capacity and use its technology to find new roles for “fallen angels” — compounds that were shelved after they didn't work for one disease, although they may still hold promise against another. Brown succeeds Charles Cohen, who will now serve as chairman of the company's supervisory board.

PROTEOMICS

David Muddiman

David Muddiman has recently moved from the chemistry department at Virginia Commonwealth University to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to take up a position as professor of biochemistry and molecular biology. He also becomes director of the Mass Spectrometry Group for the Study of Biological Complexity, a division of the newly formed Mayo Clinic Proteomics Research Center.

Muddiman's work focuses on using mass spectrometry to address biological questions that have clinical impacts. He was attracted to the Mayo Clinic, he says, for the access it offers to clinical populations and the opportunity to carry out technology development.

Muddiman might not have taken up the post if he had listened to colleagues who, because of his interest in basic science, warned him that this wasn't the right move. But he is convinced that the facility, which has nine mass spectrometers, will be conducive to both basic and clinical work and will help to foster collaborations with nearby institutes such as the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Ultimately, we'd like to make this a national resource,” Muddiman says.

ASTROBIOLOGY

Bruce Runnegar

Australian palaeontologist Bruce Runnegar, of the University of California, Los Angeles, is to succeed Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg as director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. For the past four years, Runnegar has directed the Center for Astrobiology at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, one of the Astrobiology Institute's 11 original lead teams. Educated in Australia at the University of Queensland, Runnegar became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1987.

The NASA consortium's aim is to examine how life began and evolved, and whether life exists on other planets. “The answers to these questions will not come quickly,” says Runnegar. “That's why NASA needs to attract bright young people to the field of astrobiology.” Part of his role will be to develop educational opportunities to help meet that need.

DRUG DISCOVERY

Sophie Combe

Trigen, a London-based drug-discovery company, has been attracting managers from large pharmaceutical companies to complete its management team, bringing the number to four over the past six months. Suresh Chahwala, who managed cardiovascular drug discovery for Pfizer's site in Sandwich, Kent, and Sophie Combe, of Aventis in Paris, were appointed in August. They follow Tony Kennedy, former global head of project management with Roche in Basel, Switzerland, and Oliver Boucher, former GlaxoSmithKline director of business development, who joined in April. The growth in management follows the company's acquisition of the nonprofit Thrombosis Research Institute (TRI), spun out of King's College London.

Sanjay Kakkar, Trigen's chief executive, expects the 20-person company to almost triple in size by the end of 2003. The company may also consolidate into one location; at present the management office in central London is a short distance from the research site at the old TRI in Chelsea.

Transitions

Mary Lopez is to join PerkinElmer Life Sciences as director of biochemistry from Proteome Systems, where she served as executive vice-president of proteomics R&D.

Biotech company Oxford BioMedica last month named Nick Woolf as senior vice-president of corporate strategy. Woolf was most recently director and head of European biotechnology research at ABN Amro.

Affymetrix recently appointed Applied Biosystems' Steve Lombardi as vice-president of corporate development. The former senior vice-president of applications and products will be involved in early-stage product development.

Last month Alan Guttmacher was named deputy director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, of which he has been a member since 1999.

Augustus Oemler will step down as director of the Carnegie Observatories in 2003. No replacement has yet been named.

Paul Goldsmith of Cornell University will step down as director of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center at the end of this year.

In December, Paul Kulesa, a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology, will join the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri, as director of imaging technology.

Jaap Goudsmit, co-founder of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and EuroVac, the European AIDS vaccine initiative, has succeeded Ton Logtenberg as chief scientific officer at biotech firm Crucell, in Leiden, the Netherlands.