Introducing New Members of Variant Bio’s Scientific Advisory Board
Four scientists, Drs. Evan Eichler, Gosia Trynka, Ryan Hernandez, and Tuuli Lappalainen, join a prominent team of experts to advise Variant.
Most biotech companies, including Variant Bio, have a Scientific Advisory Board, or SAB, made up of scientists who are renowned in their field. SABs are instrumental to providing guidance and outside perspective on the scientific direction of a company. Examples of topics presented to our SAB include novel early stage discoveries, and results from functional validation studies. As a company rooted in genomics, we are thrilled to announce the addition of four new SAB members who are experts in the fields of genome structure, function, and diversity, specifically in the context of disease. These prominent scientists, each introduced below, join our existing SAB members, who have deep knowledge of therapeutics discovery.
Dr. Evan Eichler is a Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He holds a PhD in Molecular Genetics from Baylor College of Medicine, Texas. His group studies the relationship between human genome evolution, variation, and disease using emerging technologies with a specific emphasis on autism genetics. In addition, he has advocated for and advanced the understanding of genomic variation in diverse populations.
Dr. Gosia Trynka is a Group Leader of Immune Genomics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, a non-profit genomics research institute in the UK. She is also the Experimental Science Director at Open Targets, a public-private partnership that uses human genetics and genomics data at large scale for systematic drug target identification and prioritization. She received her PhD in Genetics from Groningen University, Netherlands. Her group focuses on functional studies of genetic variants associated with disease, particularly for immune disease.
Dr. Ryan Hernandez is a Professor of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and received his PhD in Biometry from Cornell University. At UCSF, his group studies patterns of genetic variation from populations around the world using large scale sequencing data. His group has developed methods for detecting natural selection that help understand its role in the patterning of variation throughout human genomes. In addition, Dr. Hernandez is a Founder of the UCSF Propel Program, which provides biomedical research experience and career mentorship to trainees from historically underrepresented backgrounds.
Dr. Tuuli Lappalainen is a Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Director of the National Genomics Infrastructure at SciLifeLab, and a Senior Associate Member at the New York Genome Center. She holds a PhD in Genetics from the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her group studies regulatory variation in human populations and its contribution to disease. She has been a leader of large scale studies that integrate the genome and transcriptome, including the Geuvadis and GTEx projects.
Drs. Evan Eichler, Gosia Trynka, Ryan Hernandez, and Tuuli Lappalainen join our existing SAB members:
- Karen Akinsanya, PhD, Executive Vice President, Chief Biomedical Scientist, and Head of Discovery R&D at Schrödinger;
- Rob Scott, MD, Former CMO of Abbvie; and
- David McElligott, PhD, Former CSO of Petra Pharma.
Now with seven prominent scientists on our SAB, Variant Bio is even more equipped to navigate the complex, rapidly evolving terrains of genomics research and drug discovery that are at the heart of our mission.
