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| External Scientific Committee
 William P. Bro
Mark Chee, Ph.D.
Lynn Dressler, Dr.P.H.
Geoffrey Duyk, M.D., Ph.D.
David E. Housman, Ph.D.
Chanita Hughes-Halbert, Ph.D.
Catherine E. Ivy
Bruce E. Johnson, M.D.
Robert H. Waterston, M.D., Ph.D.
Past Members
Ronald A. DePinho, M.D.
Sean Eddy, Ph.D.
Steven Henikoff, Ph.D.
Leroy Hood, M.D., Ph.D.
Christopher J. Logothetis, M.D.
Charles Sawyers, M.D.
Dennis J. Slamon, M.D., Ph.D.
William P. Bro
Mr. Bro is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Kidney Cancer Association (KCA) in Chicago, Ill., a global voluntary health organization that reaches more than 30,000 constituents in Canada, the United States, the European Union and more than 100 other countries. The KCA’s mission is the global eradication of death and suffering from kidney cancer. Mr. Bro is a member of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Director’s Consumer Liaison Group, the Cancer Leadership Council, the National Health Council and the National Coalition for Cancer Research. He also serves as a director of Friends of Cancer Research, a non-profit organization that raises awareness and provides public education on cancer research, and holds a seat on the Kidney Health Council of the American Urological Association. Mr. Bro is listed as co-author of two recent journal articles, one about the treatment of renal cell carcinoma and another dealing with competition between cancer charities. He is a 16-year kidney cancer survivor.
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Mark Chee, Ph.D.
Dr. Chee is an internationally recognized expert in nucleic acid analysis and oligonucleotide array technology. He presently serves as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer of Prognosys Biosciences, Inc., in La Jolla, Calif. Previously, he was a co-founder of Illumina, Inc., in San Diego, Calif. and senior scientist at Affymetrix, Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif. Dr. Chee is currently active in the development of microbead, biochip and microarray techniques for studying the human genome. He has numerous publications and patents and serves on the editorial board of the journal, Genome Research. His articles have appeared in more than 30 peer-reviewed journals and he owns more than 40 issued patents.
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Lynn Dressler, Dr.P.H.
Dr. Dressler is an assistant professor in the University of North Carolina (UNC) Eshelman School of Pharmacy, Division of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy, and serves as associate director of Ethics and Policy in the Institute of Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy at UNC. Her background integrates translational research in breast cancer, health and science policy and bioethics. Currently, her work focuses on disclosure of genetic research results to research subjects and adoption of pharmacogenomic testing in medical oncology. Dr. Dressler has worked with NCI and the Cancer and Leukemia Group B, a national clinical trials group, developing science policy to guide the responsible access and use of human specimens in cancer research. She has chaired the NCI Group Banking Committee’s Regulatory Subcommittee, charged with developing a revised NCI informed consent template for cooperative clinical trials. Dr. Dressler is currently the principle investigator of UNC’s Center of Excellence in Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Research, one of five centers supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). Dr. Dressler also serves as director of the Research Ethics Consultation Service, a service to help investigators, administrators and institutional review boards, address the challenging ELSI issues inherent in genetic and genomic research studies as well as clinical translational research.
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Geoffrey Duyk, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Duyk serves as managing director of Texas Pacific Group (TPG) Ventures, in Menlo Park, Calif. Before joining TPG, he served on its board of directors and was president of research and development at Exelixis, where he led a 550-person group focused on the discovery and development of small-molecule therapeutics. Dr. Duyk was also among the founding scientific staff at Millennium Pharmaceuticals and eventually assumed the role of vice president of genetics. He currently serves on the board of directors for Avidia, Inc., in Mountain View, Calif.; Guava Technologies, Inc., in Hayward, Calif.; Macrogenics, in Rockville, Md.; Open Biosystems, in Huntsville, Ala.; and Cardiovascular Systems, Inc, in St. Paul, Minn. He also has been and continues to be a member of numerous National Institutes of Health (NIH) panels and oversight committees focused on the planning and execution of the Human Genome Project. Dr. Duyk has published 51 articles.
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David E. Housman, Ph.D.
Dr. Housman is the Ludwig Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Mass., as well as an associate in Neurology and Genetics at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Mass. He is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and has served on many advisory boards including those of the NHGRI, Merck Genome Project, and the NCI Board of Scientific Counselors. His research interests include identifying and characterizing genes involved in human diseases such as cancer, neurodegenerative disease and cardiovascular disease. Dr. Housman has received the National Biotechnology Award from the National Conference on Biotechnology Ventures for his research in the field of genomics. He has authored more than 335 publications.
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Chanita Hughes-Halbert, Ph.D.
Dr. Hughes-Halbert is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The goal of Dr. Hughes-Halbert’s research program is to identify sociocultural, psychological and environmental determinants of cancer disparities and to translate this information into community-based interventions to reduce cancer disparities in medically underserved populations. Developing and evaluating strategies to increase access to and utilization of genetic services among African Americans is a particular focus of her research. She has been a principle investigator of federally funded peer-reviewed research to evaluate genetic counseling and testing protocols among African American women and women who are carriers of the breast cancer genes called BRCA1 and BRCA2. Currently, Dr. Hughes-Halbert’s is principal investigator of the NCI-funded West Philadelphia Consortium to Address Disparities; Co-principal investigator of the NCI-funded Penn Center for Population Health and Health Disparities; director of the Community Outreach and Dissemination Core; and principal investigator for a project on Determinants of Ethnic Differences in Quality of Life within the Penn Center for Population Health.
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Catherine E. Ivy
Ms. Ivy is President of the Ben and Catherine Ivy Foundation in Palo Alto, Calif. The foundation funds patient-focused research on gliomas — cancers that start in the brain — leading to the development of better diagnostics and treatment that offer long-term survival and a high-quality of life for patients with brain tumors. Ms. Ivy is responsible for the administration, investment management and charitable grants awarded by the California-based private family foundation. Ms. Ivy designs the overall grant-making strategies and policies with an emphasis on the needs of education and medical research, specifically for brain cancer. Ms. Ivy also monitors the use of Foundation grants to ensure they are being used for appropriate charitable activities related to the Foundation’s goals.
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Bruce E. Johnson, M.D.
Dr. Johnson is Director of the Lowe Center for Thoracic Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mass., where he has multiple responsibilities including research, teaching and clinical care. He leads the Lung Cancer Program for the seven Harvard Medical School affiliated institutions and serves as an associate professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. He has received many awards, including the Commendation Medal of the United States Public Health Service, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, International Journal of Oncology, among others. Dr. Johnson has also served on dozens of committees and advisory boards, including medical and scientific advisory boards of the National Naval Medical Center, NCI, and The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. With more than 200 publications, his research interests include studying appropriate targets for lung cancer and developing novel therapeutics for these specific targets.
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Robert H. Waterston, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Waterston is an internationally noted scientific leader and one of the early architects of gene mapping and DNA sequencing and currently serves as Chair of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. His work on large-scale DNA sequencing was critical to the success of the Human Genome Project, for which he was the central coordinator for the physical map that formed the framework for the enterprise. His current research is aimed at understanding how genomic information is interpreted to enable life. Among his numerous awards, he is the recipient of the 2002 International Gairdner Award, the Genetics Society of America’s Beadle Award, and the first Dan David Prize. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Waterston has published 131 papers and 13 books, chapters and reviews.
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Ronald A. DePinho, M.D.
Dr. DePinho is Professor of Medicine (Genetics) at Harvard Medical School, Director of the Center for Applied Cancer Science at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and American Cancer Society-Edith A. Pistorino Research Professor at Harvard Medical School, all in Boston, Mass. He has received numerous awards including the Clair W. and Richard P. Morse Research Award from DFCI. He is a member of the board of directors of the American Association for Cancer Research and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. He also serves on the editorial board of several journals, including Nature Cancer Reviews, and the scientific advisory boards of several organizations including GenPath Pharmaceuticals, Inc., in Cambridge, Mass., and Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y. He has authored or co-authored 140 articles and 450 book chapters and reviews. His research interests include the exploration of the roles of Myc, Rb, p53, and telomerase in cancer and senescence.
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Sean Eddy, Ph.D.
Dr. Eddy is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and the Alvin Goldfarb Distinguished Professor of Computational Biology in the Department of Genetics, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Mo., where he is also affiliated with the Washington University Genome Sequencing Center. His research interests include the evolutionary history of catalytic and structural RNAs, development of algorithms for RNA structure analysis, and other aspects of computational genome sequence analysis. He is the author of the HMMER software for biological sequence analysis, a coauthor of the Pfam database of protein domains, and a co-author of the book Biological Sequence Analysis: Probabilistic Models of Proteins and Nucleic Acids (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He was a member of NHGRI’s National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research and the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Community Standards for Publication-Related Data and Materials. Dr. Eddy has co-authored two books and published 70 articles.
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Steven Henikoff, Ph.D.
Dr. Henikoff is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a member of the Basic Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Wash. He performs experimental research on chromosome structure, function, and evolution and develops tools for sequence comparison, in vivo mapping, and functional genomics. Dr. Henikoff was recently elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has 110 published peer-reviewed articles and more than 50 articles and coauthored books.
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Leroy Hood, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Hood is President and Director of the Institute for Systems Biology, which he founded in 2000 in Seattle, Wash. His research has focused on the study of molecular immunology, biotechnology and genomics. He has published more than 600 articles in peer-reviewed journals and co-authored 46 textbooks in biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology and genetics. Most recently, Dr. Hood’s lifelong contributions to biotechnology have earned him the prestigious 2004 Association for Molecular Pathology Award for Excellence in Molecular Diagnostics. He was also awarded the 2003 Lemelson-MIT Prize for Innovation and Invention, 2002 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology and 1987 Lasker Prize for his studies of the mechanism of immune diversity. Dr. Hood is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, American Association of Arts and Sciences and the NCI’s Board of Scientific Advisors.
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Christopher J. Logothetis, M.D.
Dr. Logothetis is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Genitourinary Medical Oncology at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. He is an internationally recognized leader in prostate cancer research and principal investigator of the M.D. Anderson Specialized Programs of Research Excellence in prostate cancer. He has validated clinical biologic markers in prostate cancer. Dr. Logothetis is the Director of the Genitourinary Cancer Center and the Prostate Cancer Research Program, a multidisciplinary collaboration of physicians and scientists dedicated to genitourinary cancer treatment, research, prevention and education. Among other responsibilities, Dr. Logothetis is on the advisory boards of a number of companies, including Synta Pharmaceuticals’ Oncology Advisory Board, and is a leader in the Therapy Consortium, an active collaborative of researchers involved in the development of innovative therapy for prostate cancer. He has published 205 articles.
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Charles Sawyers, M.D.
Dr. Sawyers is the Marie Josée and Henry R. Kravis Chair and the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program Chair at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, N.Y. His recent awards include the Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award; University of California, San Diego– Nature Medicine Translational Medicine Award; Bristol-Myers Squibb Freedom to Discover Award; Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Association for Cancer Research; and David A. Karnofsky Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The long-term goal of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program is discovery and development of novel approaches to detection, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of cancer.
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Dennis J. Slamon, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Slamon is currently professor and chief of the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Medicine. As the primary force behind the development of Herceptin as a treatment for advanced breast cancer, Dr. Slamon is noted as a pioneer in the emerging wave of new, more-effective therapies designed to fight cancer at its genetic roots. He is currently investigating Herceptin’s effectiveness in women with newly diagnosed breast cancer. Dr. Slamon has published more than 150 publications and has received many awards, including the 2004 American Cancer Society Medal of Honor for Clinical Research. He also serves as UCLA’s Executive Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Medicine and has held scientific advisory positions at numerous companies and institutions including Genentech in San Francisco, Calif., and the NIH in Bethesda, Md. Dr. Slamon has also served as a member of the President’s Cancer Panel since 2000.
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