Scientific Advisory Board

Dr. Jonathan K.C. Knowles

Dr. Knowles was Head of Group Research and Member of the Executive Committee at Roche up to the end of 2009. He was a member of the Genentech Board for the last 12 years and a member of the Chugai Board for seven years. Dr. Knowles was also the chairman of the Corporate Governance Committee of Genentech. Under his leadership, the company developed and implemented a strategy of highly effective therapies based on personalized healthcare.

He was for 5 years the Chairman of the Research Directors' Group of EFPIA (European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industry Associations) and was the first chairman of the Board of the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a unique public-private partnership between 28 Pharmaceutical companies and the European Commission with a budget of more than 2 Billion Euros over five years.

Jonathan Knowles was recently appointed Professor of Translational Medicine at EPFL in Switzerland, holds a Distinguished Professorship in Personalized Health care at FIMM (Finnish Institute for Molecular Medicine) at the University of Helsinki, and has been appointed to a Visiting chair at the University of Oxford. In addition, he is a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization and a Visiting Scholar of Pembroke College Cambridge. From 2011, he was appointed as a Trustee of Cancer Research UK and serves on the scientific advisory boards of a number of publically funded initiatives.

• From the beginning of 2010, Dr. Knowles joined the Board of Caris Life Sciences, an international cutting edge molecular diagnostics company based in Irving, Texas. Caris is focused on revolutionary new blood based diagnostics for cancer and other serious diseases.

• Jonathan Knowles remains very excited by the short term prospects for more personalized medicine as he believes this is the best and perhaps only way in which effective new therapies can be created.

Prof Barbara Prainsack

Barbara Prainsack is Professor of Sociology and Politics of Bioscience at Brunel University, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology at St Thomas' Hospital, King's College London. Barbara has published widely on regulatory, societal, and ethical dimensions of bioscience and biomedicine, and in particular, on DNA testing. She chairs the Scientific Committee of the ESF Forward Look on Personalised Medicine for the European Citizen (with Aarno Palotie and Stephen Holgate), and is a member of the Austrian National Bioethics Commission advising the federal government in Vienna.

Michael J. Morgan

Michael Morgan was director of Research Partnerships & Ventures at the Wellcome Trust. He was responsible for new enterprises such as the DIAMOND synchrotron, and the SNPs Consortium (TSC), a partnership of the Trust and 12 private companies. He played a major role in the international coordination of the human genome project and was also responsible (as Chief Executive) for developing the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus.

He became a director of DIAMOND and Chairman of the Structural Genomics Consortium, a partnership with Canadian and Swedish public entities, GSK, Novartis and Merck, tasked with determining the structures of human proteins of importance to human health.

In 2006 he was appointed Chief Scientific Officer of Genome Canada where he instituted a new consultative process to determine strategic priorities for Canadian investments in genomic, proteomic, and allied research programmes. He retired in 2009.