Biographies

John C. Reed, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. John C. Reed is President & Chief Executive Officer of the Burnham Institute, a non-profit biomedical research institute with over 600 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, more than doubling the number of researchers. Dr. Reed also conceived of and was instrumental in launching the formation of a new research center at the Burnham Institute devoted to research on aging and neurodegenerative diseases. 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.

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, and of GMP/Diagnostics, a cancer diagnostics company. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of IDUN Pharmaceuticals, Inc., ISIS Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and BIOCOM, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Burnham Institute. Dr. Reed also serves on Scientific Advisory Boards for IDUN Pharmaceuticals, Abbott Laboratories, ISIS Pharmaceuticals, GMP/Diagnostics, Stratagene, Structural Bioinformatics, Genome Biosciences, and Entropia.

The Burnham Institute is an independent, nonprofit, public benefit organization dedicated to basic biomedical research principally in the areas of cancer, aging, and the neurosciences. The Institute ranks consistently among the world's most influential research organizations for the impact of its research in analyses conducted annually by the Institute for Scientific Information.
www.burnham.org