Re-Designing Pre-Competitive Drug Discovery

Kathy Giusti

Kathy Giusti is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF) and the Multiple Myeloma Research Consortium (MMRC). In 1998, following her diagnosis with multiple myeloma, Giusti founded the MMRF to fund innovative myeloma research and drug discovery. Having raised more than $120 million to date, the MMRF is the world's number one funder of myeloma research. As an extension of the MMRF's mission, Giusti founded the MMRC in 2004 to enable leading research institutions to work with industry to speed the discovery and development of effective new treatments. Comprising 15 academic institutions across North America, the MMRC is widely recognized for breaking down barriers in tissue banking, data management, genomics, and clinical trials, and is considered an optimal research model to accelerate the development of new therapies. To date, the MMRC has advanced 19 clinical trials of novel compounds and combination approaches through its clinical trials network.

Barbara Mittleman

Barbara B. Mittleman, M.D. is the Director of NIH's (National Institutes of Health) Public-Private Partnership Program. In that capacity, she oversees activities to develop and implement policy, to facilitate access of NIH and a wide range of outside partners from industry, public advocacy, professional societies and government agencies to one another, and promotes the partnership from inception to launch to manifestation. She was instrumental in the negotiations that led to the formation of The Biomarkers Consortium, co-chaired the first mHealth Summit in 2009, and works closely with NIH Institutes and Centers to enhance partnership opportunities and success. Her training is in internal medicine and rheumatology, encompassing both clinical and basic science aspects of autoimmunity. She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh Medical School and completed residency and fellowship training there. She came to NIH in 1991 to pursue post-doctoral training in cellular immunology, eventually heading up a laboratory in the National Institute of Mental Health focusing on the immunology of psychiatric disease. She then moved to the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases as the Director of Scientific Interchange, where she facilitated partnerships, one of which involved the founding of a community research clinic and partnerships with some 60 plus community organization. She came to the NIH Office of the Director, Office of Science Policy in 2005, at the inauguration of the Program on Public-Private Partnerships as the founding director. Her publications include work in the cellular immune aspects of autoimmune and psychiatric disease, health disparities, and partnerships.

Thea Norman

Thea Norman is Director of Strategic Development at Sage Bionetworks.

Rob Snelders

Ron Snelders is the Project Manager of the Discovery Network project.

Dr. Marty Tenenbaum

Marty Tenenbaum is the Chairman of CollabRx, a provider of Web-based applications and services that help cancer patients and their physicians selectoptimal treatments and trials. Dr. Tenenbaum is also the founder of CancerCommons, an open science community that compiles and continually refinesinformation about cancer subtypes and treatments, based on the literature andactual patient outcomes.

Dr. Tenenbaum was educated at MIT and Stanford in the 1960s. He spent the 1970s doing artificial intelligence research at SRI, the 1980s managing computer science research for Schlumberger, and the 1990s pioneering Internet commerce. He is a fellow and former board member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a former consulting professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He currently serves as a director of Patients Like Me, the Public Library of Science, Efficient Finance, and Earth Analytics Group.

Huib Vriesendorp

Vriesendorp is a radiation oncologist from Syracuse, NY, USA. He was employed by the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Radiobiological Institute of TNO in Rijswijk (The Netherlands)