Chris Ashton has been named chief executive officer of Etiologics (Oxford, UK), a company set up to commercialize research developed by the UK Medical Research Council's Mouse Genome Unit. Previously, Dr. Ashton has served as vice president at Orchid BioSciences and commercial director at Inpharmatica.

Ned Barnholt, president and CEO of Agilent Technologies (Palo Alto, CA), has been named chairman of the company's board of directors. Mr. Barnholt replaces Gerald Grinstein, who will retire from the board in March 2003. Mr. Grinstein, formerly chairman and CEO of both Burlington Northern and Western Airlines, became a director and non-executive chairman of Agilent's board when the company was launched in 1999.

Raymond T. Bartus has been appointed to the position of vice president of research and development at Ceregene (San Diego, CA). Dr. Bartus is the founding editor of the journal Neurobiology of Aging: Experimental and Clinical Research, and served most recently as senior vice president, pre-clinical R&D at Alkermes.

Insert Therapeutics (Pasadena, CA) has announced the appointment of Leonard R. Borrmann as president and CEO. Dr. Borrmann joins the company from Maret Pharmaceuticals, where he held the same positions. He was also previously CEO of Acadia Pharmaceuticals.

PhageTech (Montreal, PQ, Canada) has announced the election of Gervais Dionne to its board of directors. Dr. Dionne is the former senior vice president of R&D at Shire BioChem, and was a co-founder and chief scientific officer of BioChem Pharma.

OpGen (Madison, WI) has named Colin Dykes as chief scientific officer. Dr. Dykes spent 16 years at Glaxo (now GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)), and was appointed UK genetics director in 1997. Most recently, he served as vice president of research at Variagenics.

Peter Fellner

British Biotech (Oxford, UK) has elected Peter Fellner as non-executive chairman of its board of directors. He succeeds Christopher Hampson, who is retiring after serving as chairman since 1998. Dr. Fellner has been chief executive officer of Celltech Group since 1990, and will become that company's chairman when his successor as CEO takes up his appointment, which is expected to be later this year.

Bruce A. Huebner has been named president and chief operating officer of Nanogen (San Diego, CA). Mr. Huebner has been a consultant to Nanogen since August 2002, before which he served as executive vice president and chief operating officer at Gen-Probe. Nanogen has also announced that Kieran T. Gallahue has resigned his position as president to pursue other opportunities, and that Randy White has left both his positions as CEO and a member of the board of directors of Nanogen for personal health reasons. Executive chairman Howard C. Birndorf will now serve as Nanogen's CEO.

Microfluidics start-up Nanostream (Pasadena, CA) has named Chris Lehman as vice president, business development. He was most recently director of business development with Genencor International.

Avigen (Alameda, CA) has announced the appointment of Glenn Pierce as vice president, clinical development, responsible for the company's gene therapy clinical trials. Dr. Pierce was most recently vice president, therapeutic product development at Selective Genetics, a gene therapy company co-founded in 1998, and has served two terms as president of the National Hemophilia Foundation, in 1992 and in 2002.

SuperGen (Dublin, CA) today announced that Craig S. Rosenfeld has joined the company as chief scientific officer. Dr. Rosenfeld served most recently as director of the bone marrow transplant program at Texas Oncology.

Corgentech (Palo Alto, CA) has announced the appointment of Lynn Seely as vice president of clinical research. She joins Corgentech from Cytyc Health Corp., where she served as vice president of clinical development, and was previously at Chiron, where she was director of clinical development.

Structural Bioinformatics (San Diego, CA) has announced the appointments of J. Edward Semple as executive director of medicinal chemistry and Hanne Dannulat as European managing director. Prior to joining SBI, Dr. Semple served as executive director of chemical research at Corvas International. Ms. Dannulat has spent the last 15 years at GlaxoSmithKline and Glaxo Wellcome in positions of increasing responsibility including sales, marketing manager, business unit director, and finally commercial director.