Corus Pharma (Seattle, WA, USA) has announced the expansion of its management team. Kirby Cramer, chairman emeritus of Hazleton Laboratories and a member of Corus's board since 2001, has been elected chairman of the board. In addition, Melissa Yeager has been promoted to the position of vice president of regulatory affairs and quality assurance. Before joining Corus in 2001, she was director of regulatory affairs for PathoGenesis.

LION Bioscience (Heidelberg, Germany) has announced the appointment of Joseph F. Donahue as president of LION's North American operations. Mr. Donahue, who will be based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, joins the company from Spotfire, where he most recently served as vice president of global life sciences and chemicals markets.

Michael A. Friedman has been named president and CEO of City of Hope National Medical Center and Beckman Research Institute (Los Angeles, CA, USA). Dr. Friedman previously served as acting commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration under President Clinton and as associate director of the National Cancer Institute. Most recently, he was senior vice president, R&D, medical and public policy, for Pharmacia, and chief medical officer for biomedical preparedness at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

Ben D. Kaplan has been appointed senior vice president and chief financial officer at Genaissance Pharmaceuticals (New Haven, CT, USA). He has been senior vice president, finance and administration and CFO at Ikonisys since November 2002. From 1997 to 2001, Mr. Kaplan was vice president and CFO at Packard Bioscience. He succeeds Joseph Keyes, who is resigning as Genaissance's CFO to pursue other interests.

ActivX Biosciences (La Jolla, CA, USA) has announced the appointment of J.C. MacRae to the newly created position of executive vice president and chief financial officer. He joins ActivX from ISTA Pharmaceuticals, where he recently served as executive vice president, chief operating officer and CFO.

Martin Mattingly has been named executive vice president at CancerVax (Carlsbad, CA, USA). Formerly vice president and general manager for Pfizer's Agouron Pharmaceuticals, Dr. Mattingly will oversee corporate development and marketing at CancerVax.

Gregory D. Perry has been named vice president, finance and CFO at Transkaryotic Therapies (Cambridge, MA, USA). He joins the company from PerkinElmer, where he served as senior vice president, finance and business development, life sciences.

POINT Biomedical (San Carlos, CA, USA) has named Lee Rauch as chief business officer. Since 1999, she has served as senior vice president, corporate development first for COR Therapeutics, and later for Millennium Pharmaceuticals after its acquisition of COR.

Robert L. Strausberg, director of the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Cancer Genomics Office since 1999, has been named vice president for research at The Institute for Genomic Research (Rockville, MD, USA). Before assuming his role at the NCI, Dr. Strausberg was at the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Human Genome Research, where he headed the sequencing technology branch from 1994 to 1996.

Michael West has joined BioMarker Pharmaceuticals (Campbell, CA, USA) as a member of its board of directors. Dr. West was one of the founders of Geron, and is now chairman and CEO of Advanced Cell Technology. In addition, Paul C. Watkins has been appointed vice president of business development. He was previously responsible for business development, scientific affairs, new product identification and intellectual property strategy and portfolio management at Ancile Pharmaceuticals.

We regret to inform our readers that Jozef “Jeff” Schell of the Max Planck Institute in Germany passed away on April 17. Born in Antwerp, Belgium, Prof. Schell was one of the founding fathers of modern plant biotechnology. Along with Marc van Montagu and Luis Herrera-Estrella, he developed some of the first procedures for introducing artificial genes into plants, paving the way for the genetically modified crop revolution. The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, according to his wife, Dr. Elizabeth Schell, a physician. He was 67.