Genomics ‘rabble-rouser’ returns to biotech - May 28, 2009
Genome-analysis whiz Eric Schadt is leaving his fulltime commitment to the nonprofit company he helped create only a few months ago. His new job: chief scientific officer for Pacific Biosciences, a next-next generation sequencing company based in Menlo Park, California.
Schadt has achieved an unlikely level of fame for someone who performs complex network analyses of how gene sequences and expression patterns relate to disease. (One recent profile referred to him as a 'bioinformatics rabble-rouser'.) Best known as the genomics mastermind behind Rosetta Inpharmatics, a biotechnology firm once based in Seattle, Schadt became a Merck employee when the pharma giant bought Rosetta in 2001. Earlier this year, Schadt and Rosetta founder Stephen Friend left Merck to start a nonprofit company called Sage Bionetworks that aimed to create an open-access research platform for genomics data. (See this Nature News story for more details, subscription required.)
Today, Pacific Biosciences announced that it had successfully wooed Schadt. According to Bio-IT World, Schadt intends to maintain close ties with Sage Bionetworks and remains committed to the cause, but the allure of getting his hands on PacBio’s sequencing technology was just too strong for him to maintain his full-time commitment at the nonprofit. “What we learned in generating data on a scale no-one else has generated [is] that we're only glimpsing a fraction of the biology in those systems," he told Bio-IT World. "I see the PacBio technology providing a way to go from glimpsing maybe 1% of biology in these populations to an order of magnitude beyond that."
