Scientific Advisory Board
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Chairman: Dr Alan Colman
Dr Alan Colman is currently Executive Director of the Singapore stem Cell Consortium and a Principal Investigator at the A*STAR Institute of Medical Biology, in Singapore, having recently and concurrently acted as Professor of Regenerative Medicine at King’s College, London, UK. His main current interest is the development of human disease models using induced pluripotent stem cells.
Alan Colman obtained a BA degree in Biochemistry in Oxford (1971) and a PhD under John Gurdon, a pioneer of the field of nuclear transfer, at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK (1974). After a series of academic appointments in Oxford and Warwick Universities, he became Professor of Biochemistry in the University of Birmingham, UK from 1987-1992. The focus of his academic career was the area of eucaryotic protein secretion, with a particular emphasis on the use of frog oocytes and eggs as in vivo test tubes. From 1987 until March 2002, he was research director of the company PPL Therapeutics in Edinburgh, UK. This company specialized in the production of transgenic livestock that produced human therapeutic proteins in their milk PPL attracted considerable media attention because of their participation, together with the Roslin Institute, in the technique of somatic nuclear transfer. This work led to Dolly, the world’s first sheep cloned from an adult somatic cell (1996), Polly and Molly, the first cloned transgenic livestock (1997), Diana and Cupid, the first livestock with targeted genetic changes (2000), Millie et al., the first cloned pigs (2000) and, finally, Austin and crew, the first homozygous, alpha gal transferase knock out pigs (2003). From 2002-2007, he was CSO and then CEO for the Singaporean human embryonic stem cell company, ES Cell International.
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Dr Robert Weinzierl
Dr Robert Weinzierl is a Reader in Molecular Biology at Imperial College London, and is the inventor of the HyperGenomicsTM technology, which Volition is now developing further.
Prior to joining Imperial, he carried out doctoral work at the University of Cambridge (Akam/White laboratories) and spent four years as a postdoc at UC Berkeley (Tjian laboratory).
Dr Weinzierl's research efforts focus on the structure and function of the basal transcriptional machineries in archaea and eukaryotes, with special emphasis on the molecular mechanisms of RNA polymerases. During the last decade his laboratory successfully developed a range of novel methods in the field of gene expression, including in vitro assembly of protein complexes from recombinant subunits and implementation of robotic methods for high-throughput molecular biology.
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Dr Andreas Ladurner
Dr Andreas Ladurner has been Chair of Physiological Chemistry in the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Munich since 2010 and Group Leader in the Genome Biology Unit of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg since 2003. During this period, Dr Ladurner discovered the histone variant technology which is an integral part of the NucleosomicsTM products which Volition is developing.
Before joining the University of Munich and EMBL, he was editor at the Nature Publishing Group in New York and Research Associate of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as recipient of the Wellcome Trust International Prize. Ladurner received his B.Sc. from the University of York in 1994, worked as a research scientist at SmithKline Beecham (now Glaxo SmithKline) and obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2000.
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Dr Habib Skaff
A synthetic chemist specializing in the area of nanotechnology, Dr.Skaff received a Ph.D. in Polymer Science and Engineering from the University of Massachusetts. His doctoral studies involved the design of organic and polymeric ligands for the encapsulation of semiconductor nanoparticles and modification of the physical, optical, electronic, and assembly properties of the nanoparticles. He possesses a M.S. in Polymer Science and Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and a B.S. degree in Materials Science and Engineering (Honors) from the University of Florida. He has co-authored 11 peer-reviewed scientific papers and is a co-inventor on 18 pending or issued patents in the fields of chemistry, nanotechnology, and biotechnology. Dr Skaff co-founded Intezyne Technologies and serves as the company's Chief Executive Officer, President, and Chairman of the Board of Directors. Dr. Skaff also held the position of President and is currently the Chairman of Skaff Corporation of America (Tampa, Florida). Dr. Skaff serves as a member of the Florida High Tech Corridor Council and as an advisor for the USF Center for Entrepreneurship.
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