PEOPLE INTERVIEWED

He is also a Group Leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB). He was the founder and director of the Swiss-Prot (now UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot), PROSITE and ENZYME databases from 1986 to 2009 and since then he has been involved in the development of two knowledge resources: neXtProt for human proteins and the Cellosaurus for cell lines.

Amanda has an ongoing commitment to improving cell culture practice and increasing awareness of its problems, particularly relating to cell line contamination and misidentification.

Amanda chairs the International Cell Line Authentication Committee (ICLAC), a committee of scientists that works to increase awareness of misidentified cell lines. Misidentified cell lines are commonly used in life science research and can be avoided through authentication testing.

Amanda was a member of the ATCC's Standard Development Organisation Workgroup ASN-0002, which was responsible for developing a standard for authentication of human cell lines.

Prior to joining ATCC, Maryellen was Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Clinical Operations at USDS, Inc., an independent third party evaluating the performance of molecular diagnostic tests to support regulatory, reimbursement, and adoption efforts. She also served as Director of Clinical Biomarkers at Critical Path Institute (C-Path), leading collaborative efforts to evaluate and improve the use of clinical biomarkers and optimize the pathway for development of companion diagnostics. She served as Executive Director of Genomics Services and Director of Biorepository at Gene Logic, Inc., and led business development and marketing efforts at Life Technologies, Inc.

She earned her Ph.D. in Virology from the University of Texas, and completed postdoctoral training in transcriptional regulation at The Johns Hopkins University.

Prior to starting GBSI, Freedman served as Vice Dean for Research and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Jefferson Medical College, Thomas Jefferson University. Freedman also led discovery research efforts in the pharmaceutical industry as a Vice President at Wyeth and Executive Director at Merck. Before moving to industry, Freedman was a Member and Professor of Cell Biology & Genetics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Weil Cornell Medical College. There, Freedman and his lab made several highly impactful discoveries in the area of nuclear hormone receptor structure and function.

Len Freedman has received numerous competitively funded grants, and has been the recipient of several research honors, including the Boyer Award for Biomedical Research, and a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health. He was also the 2002 recipient of the Ernst Oppenheimer Award from The Endocrine Society. Freedman has published extensively and served on numerous scientific review panels and editorial boards. He was an editor of the journal Molecular and Cellular Biology for ten years. In addition, Freedman has served on the Board of Directors of the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC).

Len Freedman earned a B.A. degree in Biology from Kalamazoo College, and a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from the University of Rochester. He completed his post-doctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Keith Yamamoto at the University of California, San Francisco.

Gartler is well known for dropping the “HeLa Bomb” in 1966 when he explained that cell lines thought free of HeLa contamination had the G6PD-A genetic marker. His work showed the importance of genetically testing cell lines to prove they are not contaminated with HeLa cells.

As a senior member of the genetic analysis R&D team at Thermo Fisher Scientific, he helps develop solutions for the research and healthcare markets, leveraging varied technologies such as capillary electrophoresis, digital PCR, next-generation sequencing, and microarray analysis. Before Thermo Fisher Scientific, he was at Nanostring Technologies running the Field Applications Specialist (FAS) team. He was also an Acting Assistant Professor at University of Washington, Department of Genome Sciences, investigating developmental genetics of Drosophila.

Since 1996, Korch has directed the University of Colorado’s Cancer Center’s DNA Sequencing & Analysis Core, using DNA sequencing and profiling to confirm the identity of numerous authentic and false human cell lines and the mutations they carry. In 2012, he led a major study on the identity of endometrial and ovarian cancer cell lines, showing that there was extensive contamination, redundancy, and misidentification among these cell lines, and raising questions about the validity of many publications using them. Since his semi-retirement at the end of 2012, Korch has been involved in identifying several additional misidentified/false cell lines.

He is member and chair of various international bodies and coordinator of several scientific networks in the fields of cancer genome analysis and personalized oncology.

Since 2005, Roland Nardone has been immersed in development and dissemination of policies and strategies that bear on corrective measures regarding the widespread use of misidentified cell lines. He has acquired extensive detailed knowledge regarding causes, effects, consequences, and prevention. Because the problem is highly nuanced he complements the methods of good laboratory practice with insights that are interview- and behavior- based; thus strategies that lead to sustainable changes with regard to cell line authenticity are produced. His 50-year involvement with short training courses (Founder and first Director of the Center for Advanced Training in Cell and Molecular Biology) adds another important dimension to his suitability for comprehensive coverage of all major aspects of cell line authentication.

After earning a Ph.D. at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, Neve became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, and then at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he utilized genomics to identify therapeutic targets in breast cancer. Then, as a scientist in Discovery Oncology at Genentech in San Francisco, he ran a target discovery group.

Richard Neve is currently a senior scientist in the Oncology group at Gilead Sciences in Foster City, California.

Schweppe has since published groundbreaking papers demonstrating the Focal Adhesion Kinase (FAK)-Src pathway plays a key role in thyroid cancer growth and metastasis, and created the first-ever thyroid cancer bone metastasis model. She is now developing clinical trials to test this pathway as a therapeutic target for advanced thyroid cancer. Schweppe has successfully competed for major research funding. She is currently an R01-funded investigator, and was previously funded by an American Cancer Society Research Scholars Grant for her work on FAK and Src.

Doug has co-authored 30 peer-reviewed manuscripts and 55 articles and chapters in non-refereed journals and books. He has presented numerous lectures and posters at national and international meetings, and is a co-inventor on several issued and pending patents. Doug has served as an invited lecturer for the University of Wisconsin - Madison, an ad hoc reviewer for several scientific journals and has participated on committees establishing national and international scientific policy.

Doug received his Bachelor of Science degree in Biology at Manchester College, and his Master of Science degree and Ph.D. in Microbiology at Miami University. Prior to joining Promega in 1991, he was a post-doctoral research associate and instructor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago.

Prior to joining PCF in 1997, Dr. Soule was a senior R&D executive for nine years at Corvas International, Inc., a public biotechnology company. He was responsible for the discovery and development of innovative products for the treatment of life-threatening cardiovascular diseases. Dr. Soule has considerable experience in medical diagnostic and device industries as well.

Dr. Soule received a PhD from Baylor College of Medicine in Virology and Epidemiology and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Immunology and Vascular Biology at the Scripps Research Institute.