Dr John Reed
Member, BMS IAC (2004-2006)
President & CEO, The Burnham Institute, USA (2002-)
Scientific Director, The Burnham Institute, USA (1995-2002)
Deputy Director, Burnham Institute Cancer Center, USA (1994-2002)
Scientific Co-Founder of IDUN Pharmaceuticals (1993) and GMP/Diagnostics
Dr. John C. Reed is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Burnham Institute, a non-profit biomedical research institute with over 700 employees located in La Jolla, CA. Dr. Reed received his undergraduate education from the University of Virginia (BA/Biochemistry), where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1980, then entered the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania (MD, PhD), where he graduated in Alpha Omega Alpha in 1986. Dr. Reed’s residency training in Pathology & Laboratory Medicine was undertaken at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, followed by post-doctoral training in Molecular Biology at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. Dr. Reed was an Assistant Professor in the Medical School at U. Penn from 1990-1992, and served as a director of the Laboratory for Molecular Diagnosis, performing DNA-based testing for clinical diagnosis at the university hospital. He also ran a basic–research laboratory, and was active in teaching residents, medical and graduate students.
In 1992, Dr. Reed joined the Burnham Institute, and was promoted to the Scientific Director position in 1995, prior to becoming President & CEO in 2002. He was chiefly responsible for recruiting and managing the scientific staff, tripling the number of researchers. Dr. Reed also conceived of and was instrumental in launching the formation of two new research centers at the Burnham Institute devoted to research on aging and neurodegenerative diseases (Dale E Webb Center for Neuroscience & Aging Research) and the institute’s Infectious & Inflammatory Disease Research Center (IIDC). Dr Reed also served as Deputy Director of the Burnham Institute’s NCI-sponsored Cancer Center from 1994 to 2002, and briefly as interim Director in 2002. He additionally holds adjunct Professorships at the University of California San Diego and San Diego State University.
Dr. Reed remains an active scientist, currently directing a laboratory of ~40 persons at the Burnham Institute. His research interests have focused primarily on cancer, but he has also made important contributions in the areas of AIDS, autoimmunity, stroke and other diseases. He has been a pioneer in delineating the fundamental mechanisms that regulate programmed cell death, a process by which cells in the body commit suicide through activation of a genetically controlled program. Much of his work has revealed how defects in programmed cell death contribute to diseases, resulting in novel strategies for therapeutic intervention. Dr. Reed is author of over 600 peer-reviewed scientific articles and over 50 book chapters. He has the distinction of having published more papers on programmed cell death (also known as “apoptosis”) during the past decade than any other scientist worldwide, according the Institute for Scientific Information. Dr. Reed was also recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information as the world 's most cited scientist in all areas of research from 1997-1999.
Dr. Reed currently serves on the editorial boards of over 12 scientific journals. He has also served in various capacities as an advisor to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), American Cancer Society (ACS), and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). He is the recipient of numerous awards for his research accomplishments, and has been awarded over 65 research grants by a variety of funding agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the NCI, the ACS, the Leukemia Society of America, CaP-CURE, ABC2, and the Susan B Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
Dr. Reed serves as an advisor and consultant to numerous biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. His inventions have resulted in over 40 U.S. Patents or Patent applications, and have spawn drug-discovery programs at several biopharmaceutical companies. Dr. Reed’s inventions in DNA-based targeting of genes in cancer have resulted in drugs that are currently undergoing Phase-III clinical testing for patients with treatment-refractory cancers (GENTA). Dr. Reed is the Scientific Co-Founder of IDUN Pharmaceuticals, a biopharmaceutical company focusing on apoptosis-based therapies (recently acquired by Pfizer), and of GMP/Diagnostics, a cancer diagnostics company. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of ISIS Pharmaceuticals, Inc., STRATAGENE, Inc., and BIOCOM. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Burnham Institute. Dr. Reed also serves or has served on Scientific Advisory Boards for IDUN Pharmaceuticals, Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers-Squibb, ISIS Pharmaceuticals, Genta, GMP/Diagnostics, Stratagene, Structural Bioinformatics, Genome Biosciences, Entropia, and the global Life-sciences Information Technology (LSIT) initiative. In November 2004, Dr. Reed was appointed to the Independent Citizen’s Oversight Committee governing The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, established with passing of Prop. 71, the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Act.
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Last Updated On 25 September 2009