DarwinHealth Leadership

PROFESSOR ANDREA CALIFANO, Dr.

Co-founder and
Chief Scientific Advisor

Andrea Califano, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Advisor, DarwinHealth™, is the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical Systems Biology at Columbia University Medical Center.

Andrea Califano, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Advisor, DarwinHealth™ , is the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical Systems Biology at Columbia University Medical Center.

He is the Founding Chair of the Department of Systems Biology, Director of the JP Sulzberger Columbia Genome Center, and Associate Director for Bioinformatics of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, and also holds appointments in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics and Department of Biomedical Informatics.

After completing a doctoral thesis in physics at the University of Florence, Italy, Dr. Califano worked at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, where he became involved in computational biology in 1990. In 1997 he became program director of the IBM Computational Biology Center. In 2000 he co-founded First Genetic Trust, Inc. to pursue translational genomics research. Finally, he joined Columbia in 2003.

Dr. Califano is very active nationally, serving on numerous editorial and scientific advisory boards, including the Board of Scientific Advisors of the National Cancer Institute, St. Jude Children’s Hospital, The MIT Koch Cancer Center, Cancer Genetics Inc., and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., among others. He has served as chair or co-chair of many international conferences and meetings, including the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR); the RECOMB-ISCB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges; Keystone Conferences; as well as several special conferences of the AACR on genomics and cancer systems biology.

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GIDEON BOSKER, MD

Co-founder and
Chief Executive Officer

Gideon Bosker, MD, the co-founder and CEO of DarwinHealth™, brings to this “precision-focused” organization the knowledge, principles, and aspirations nurtured during his 15-year career as an academic scholar and clinician.

While a faculty member at the Yale University School of Medicine and Oregon Health Sciences University, Dr. Bosker authored and/or or edited multiple core textbooks and journals in clinical medicine and pharmacotherapeutics among them, Pharmatecture: Minimizing Medications to Maximize Results, The Manual of Emergency Medicine Therapeutics, Clinical Consensus Reports, The Textbook of Primary and Acute Care Medicine, The QuickConsult Manual of Primary Care Medicine, Geriatric Emergency Medicine, and Pills that Work, Pills that Don’t.

Under his direction over the past 10 years, as Founder and CEO of CMEducation Resources, this globally-focused company has produced award-winning, live and digitally-based independent medical education programming in the fields of clinical oncology, biologics-based therapy, genomics-driven precision cancer medicine, diabetes, thrombosis, neurodegenerative disease, obesity, cardiovascular disease, medical diagnostics, genetic screening, and metabolic disorders. These multi-platform initiatives, deploying proprietary technologies and reaching tens of thousands of physicians worldwide, have been implemented under the sponsorship of leading biopharmaceutical and diagnostics companies, including Bayer Healthcare, Pfizer, Bristol Myers Squibb, Genentech, Roche, Daiichi Sankyo, Ipsen, Novo Nordisk, Astra Zeneca, Eisai, Sanofi, Regeneron, Amgen, Genzyme, Natera, Teva, and Quest.

His leadership roles at both DarwinHealth™ and CMEducation have been instrumental in galvanizing an international network of the world’s leading scientists, clinical investigators, strategists, and industry leaders who share a commitment for advancing the frontiers and foundations of cancer medicine — as well as other critical disease states with unmet therapeutic needs — based on scientifically rigorous and innovative discoveries and technologies.

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Mariano Alvarez, PhD

MARIANO ALVAREZ, PhD

Chief Scientific Officer

Dr. Alvarez obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where his work and discovery programs focused on the interactions between tumor cells and the host immune system. Following his formal education, Dr. Alvarez was appointed Senior Scientist at a biotech company where he employed gene expression profile analysis to characterize molecular changes in the brain that were triggered by tumor growth at distal sites.

After postdoctoral training in the Califano Lab at Columbia University, Dr. Alvarez was appointed Research Scientist in the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University.

Over the past nine years, in conjunction with Professor Califano, Dr. Alvarez developed the IP and core algorithms, including VIPER, that are currently deployed by DarwinHealth™ and that underpin the company’s foundational, oncotecture-driven technology platform. The platform has been successfully deployed for drug discovery, biomarker elucidation, and proteomic profiling across multiple disease states, with a focus on cancer.

This proprietary technology, the details of which have been published in the world’s leading scientific and medical journals, includes methods for the reverse engineering of regulatory networks, assessment of protein dysregulation, and computation-based inference of cell state checkpoints. His work related to the elucidation of targetable tumor checkpoints in cancer, identification of regulatory nodes implicated in neurodegeneration and behavioral disorders, and characterization of drug mechanism of action and synergy has been reported in more than 25 manuscripts published in top-tier scientific journals.

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Stuart Andrews, PhD

STUART ANDREWS, PhD

Chief Data Sciences Technology Officer (CDSTO)

Dr. Andrews received his PhD from the department of Computer Science at Brown University, Providence, RI, where he developed machine learning algorithms harnessing large quantities of ambiguous data for classification problems, including problems of in-silico, molecular docking-based, candidate drug screening.

He continued research on data-driven inference during his postdoctoral training in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, where he developed methods for network inference applicable to social and biological networks.  Following this, Dr. Andrews brought his expertise in big data and high performance computing to the field of bioinformatics, where he developed pipelines for RNA-seq at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.  He has spent the last several years as Associate Research Scientist in the Laboratory of Personalized Genomic Medicine in the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology at Columbia University Medical Center, where he worked to help develop, validate, and oversee the first comprehensive, genome-wide, whole-exome and transcriptome test for clinical cancer diagnosis.

 

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Xiaoyun Sun, PhD

XIAOYUN SUN, PhD

Senior Computational Biologist

Dr. Sun received her PhD from the Department of Computer Science at Brandeis University, where she developed a mathematical model based on dynamic Bayesian theory to model biological networks. She also developed an advanced method for ranking protein-protein interactions in TAP/MS data.

She joined the Columbia University Genome Center as a data scientist, where she benchmarked and evaluated existing tools to analyze next generation sequence data. She developed and maintained robust and highly automated computational pipelines to analyze whole genome sequence, Exome-sequence, and RNA-sequence data, including data QC, alignment, variant calling, differential gene expression analysis, pathway enrichment analysis, fusion genes detection and copy number detection.

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Mariana Babor, PhD

MARIANA BABOR, PhD

Senior Manager, Computational Biology
Team Leader, Computational Immunobiology/Immuno-Oncology

Dr. Babor obtained her PhD in the field of Structural Bioinformatics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she developed an algorithm to predict metal binding sites in protein structures. Then, she moved to the field of Immunoinformatics, where she applied Bioinformatics to impact human health. At UCSF, she computationally designed antibodies with high affinity and specificity.

As the advent of the high throughput sequencing technologies resulted in an ever-growing wealth of genomic data, she joined the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, where she analyzed human transcriptomics data to understand immune responses to vaccination and infectious diseases, such as dengue and whooping cough.

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Pasquale Laise

PASQUALE LAISE, PhD

Senior Director of Single Cell Systems Pharmacology and Lead Scientist, Computational and Experimental Biology

Dr. Laise  holds a  master’s degree in Biology and a PhD in Nonlinear Dynamics and Complex Systems (School of informatics, Dept. of Engineering) both from the University of Florence, Italy.

His PhD project was strongly interdisciplinary, ranging from molecular biology to mathematical modeling.  He developed computational models to study the dynamics of molecular pathways implicated in the onset and progression of multiple cancer types.

After his graduation, he moved to the laboratory of Stem Cells Epigenetics at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan (Italy) where he studied the epigenetic mechanisms underlying the development and the progression of brain cancer,  and deepened his studies in cancer computational biology.

During his postdoctoral training, he was awarded several prestigious fellowships, including a travel grant from the Umberto Veronesi Foundation that allowed him to join the laboratory of Computational Biology at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) as a visiting postdoctoral fellow.  At UCLA,  Dr. Laise integrated computational and experimental strategies to study the genetic and epigenetic layers of ovarian cancer dysregulation.

Dr. Laise completed his postdoctoral training  in the Laboratory of Systems Biology, headed by Dr. Andrea Califano, at Columbia University in New York City. He studied regulatory-network-based methodologies  for the systematic analysis and integration of multi-omics data, and soon joined the  Department of Systems Biology as a Research Scientist. He has also been a leading instructor at the Single Cell Bootcamp at Columbia University.

Dr. Laise has over 10 years of experience in cancer computational biology  and has authored and co-authored multiple papers published in peer reviewed international journal.

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