Boards
Board of Directors
Jeffry Stock, PhD
Chairman
A tenured full professor in the departments of Molecular Biology and Chemistry at Princeton University , he is one of the world's leading experts in signal transduction and global cellular regulation with over 150 original scientific articles in the area. He is an elected fellow of the American Society of Microbiology and a winner of the Humboldt Prize. He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Biochemistry and BMC Microbiology, and he serves on the Centers Review Committee for the National Institute of Drug Abuse. He is a co-founder of Signum Biosciences and Cadus Pharmaceuticals (KDUS). Professor Stock is best known for his seminal work on the biochemistry of signal transduction in micro-organisms. He is the force behind our science, which is why our laboratory is located near his Princeton research laboratory.
Dr Stock is co-founder of Signum Biosciences and My Mercury Risk Inc. Prior to Signum, Dr. Stock directed the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA's School of Medicine. He has broad scientific, media and business experience, holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar and won the Freund-Porter Entrepreneurship award, he has a PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University. He has authored a number of books on the implications of new technology, particularly in the life sciences, and several best-sellers on human ethics and values.
Has been active in the field of finance since 1982, when he joined Salomon Brothers, which is now a part of Citicorp. In his 5 year tenure there, he created various mathematical models for valuing fixed income securities, developed the conceptual framework for “option adjusted spread,” which has become a standard analytical metric for complex fixed income securities. In 1988, he and a colleague left Salomon and established the hedge fund Parsec Trading Corp., which has been a successful fixed income arbitrage fund for over 13 years. At the end of 2002, Modzelewski established his own trading and investment firm, Maple Engine L.L.C., a private multi-strategy investment and trading fund focusing on speculative trading and venture investment. He serves on the Boards of the Reason Foundation and the Institute for Justice.
Rohto Pharmaceutical Co. President and CEO, is a visionary leader in fourth generation of company leadership. He is a graduate of Japan’s prestigious Tokyo University and has done post graduate work overseas. He is a young, energetic and dynamic leader with a progressive global vision for the growth and development of Rohto’s shareholder value. He has led Rohto’s visionary long term investments in R&D and has directed the continuous and dramatic growth of sales in recent years in spite of a weak economy in Japan. In the short term he has focused all activities on the goals of achieving further growth in Rohto’s operations and improving earnings by introducing value-added products and using the overseas network to expand operations. Strategically Rohto will continue to concentrate on sales of beauty care products and reinforce R&D capabilities, primarily at Rohto Research Village Kyoto, in order to develop and launch new products globally. Our mutual research collaboration will contribute to Rohto’s strategic goals, while enhancing the commercial, business development and market focus of Signum’s research priorities. We look forward to a productive and long term relationship.
Advisory Board
Signum has assembled a group of experienced and distinguished experts to provide critical counsel and feedback about the company’s strategy and its execution of that strategy. The diverse nature of Signum’s planned product lines, its innovative fusion of pharmaceutical and consumer research, its divergent marketing challenges, and its heavy reliance on collaboration and partnership, make it critical for the company to have timely access to critical strategic thinkers with broad interdisciplinary experience.
General Advisory Board
Thomas Shenk, PhD
Advisory Board Chairman
Scientific Advisors
Thomas Shenk, PhD
Advisory Board Chairman
Thomas is the Elkins Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a past president both of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Society for Virology. He serves on the Board of Directors of Merck & Co. and Cell Genesys.
Lynn is the Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Virology, President of the American Society for Virology, and a member of the AAAS board of directors. He also was commissioner of the New Jersey Cancer Commission and has led a variety of corporate and government research programs.
George spent over 30 years with Bristol-Myers Squibb, most recently as Senior Vice President of Corporate Development. At BMS, he was responsible for some 150 mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and divestitures worldwide including the merger of Bristol Myers with Squibb and the sale of Clairol to Procter & Gamble.
Howard chairs the Owner/President Program in Executive Training at Harvard Business School, where he is the Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration, a chair established to provide for research and teaching of entrepreneurship. He has authored, edited or co-authored six books including: New Business Ventures and the Entrepreneur and Do Lunch or Be Lunch.
Arshad was Executive VP and Chairman of the Global Markets and Investment Banking Group at Merrill Lynch until 2004 when he founded New Vernon Capital, a hedge fund that has since grown to $1B in assets. He received his MBA from Harvard and is on the Board of Directors of The NASDAQ Stock Market and the Cancer Institute of New Jersey.
Dr. Cummings is Director of the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, Las Vegas. Previously he was the Augustus S. Rose Professor of Neurology and Professor of Psychiatry and Bio-behavioral Sciences at UCLA. He founded and directed the UCLA Alzheimer's Disease Center and the Deane F. Johnson Center for Neurotherapeutics at UCLA. Dr Cummings interests embrace clinical trials and the development of new treatments for neurodegenerative disorders and other neurological diseases. He is past president of the Behavioral Neurology Society and of the American Neuropsychiatric Association and in 2005 was named Edward Henderson State-of-the-Art Lecturer by the American Geriatrics Society. He has authored or edited 20 books and over 450 peer reviewed papers.
Dr. Iqbal is currently Professor and Chairman, Department of Neurochemistry, at the New York State Institute for Basic Research in Staten Island, New York and co-founded the biennial International Conferences on Alzheimer's Disease & Related Disorders, (ICAD). Dr. Iqbal has authored over 200 scientific papers in prestigious American and international scientific journals and edited eight books on research advances in Alzheimer's disease. His major research interests are the neurobiology of Alzheimer's disease and related neurodegenerative disorders, especially the molecular mechanisms of neurofibrillary degeneration. His pioneering studies on neuronal protein pathology and discoveries of the involvement of the tau protein and its abnormal hyperphosphorylation in Alzheimer disease have won him several prestigious honors and awards, including the Potemkin Prize from the American Academy of Neurology and the Zenith Award from the Alzheimer's Association.
Dr. Shi is Dean of the School of Life Sciences, and Professor of the Department of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Previously, he was the Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor in the department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. He has determined the crystal structure of several critical apoptotic proteins, and is a world leader in x-ray crystal structure determination. For his research contributions, Dr. Shi has received a number of recognitions, including the 2003 Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society.
Dr Vafai is a graduate of Harvard Medical School currently training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital. As an undergraduate at Princeton, he worked with Dr. Jeffry Stock to develop a model linking PP2A methylation to Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis. He continues to work with Signum to develop therapeutics targeting the PP2A methylation system.
