Biographies

Paul Laskin

Paul began his career in life sciences as a researcher with The City of Hope studying the effect of interleukins and various T-cell subsets on the graft versus host reaction. In 1982 he continued research into development of biological models for glaucoma, cataracts and hyper-proliferative diseases at Allergan Pharmaceuticals. His job allowed him to perform a variety of tasks from cell culture to methods development including image analysis on a DEC PDP 11/73 (all in 256 shades of grey).

In 1986, he joined McGaw Inc. as the lead scientist developing manufacturing improvements to a plasma expander and developing an anti-atherosclerosis compound. His work led to the development of two new products and a variety of manufacturing process improvements. During his tenure, Paul co-wrote a database application to track amino acid analyzer results.

In 1992, Paul left McGaw Inc. to join Agouron Pharmaceuticals, a small biotech company that would bring to market Viracept a protease inhibitor used in the treatment of AIDS. Paul worked on several compounds performing assay development, stability and formulation studies. He also wrote an application to process chromatography data and set up one of the first lab backup systems at Agouron. In 1996, he took off his lab coat and joined the IT group. Having plenty of experience in the Sciences, his first project was to install Oracle Financials on an SGI. The system went live in under 4 months.

Paul held a variety of positions within IT as Agouron was bought by Warner - Lambert and then Pfizer. In 1997 he became Manager of IT and supervised the team responsible for the Financials, Document Management, HR and Sales and Marketing IT Systems. The group focused on the use of Oracle database and applications in addition to the management of other commercial applications. In 2001, Paul was transferred to the U.K., to lead the Corporate IT group responsible for supporting Pfizer's R&D data centers and IT infrastructure across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

In 2003, he returned to Pfizer, La Jolla as Director of IT Strategy and Portfolio with fiscal and project portfolio responsibility for La Jolla Site Informatics. In January of 2008, Paul left Pfizer and co-founded Cirrhus9.

Cirrhus9 is a systems integrator specializing in cloud computing and open source software solutions. With a combination of experience in the Life Sciences and IT, Cirrhus9 is well positioned to assist the pharmaceutical industry leverage the power of cloud computing.
www.cirrhus9.com