Directors
Sage is guided by distinguished science and business leaders
Stephen H. Friend MD PhD
President, CEO, and a Co-Founder of Sage
Dr. Friend is the President and CEO of Sage Bionetworks. He was previously Senior Vice President and Franchise Head for Oncology Research at Merck & Co., Inc. where he led Merck’s Basic Cancer Research efforts. In 2005, he led the Advanced Technologies and Oncology groups to firmly establish molecular profiling activities throughout Merck’s laboratories around the world, as well as to coordinate oncology programs from Basic Research through phase IIA clinical trials.
Prior to joining Merck, Dr. Friend was recruited by Dr. Leland Hartwell to join the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s Seattle Project, an advanced institute for drug discovery. While there Drs. Friend and Hartwell developed a method for examining large patterns of genes that led them to co-found Rosetta Inpharmatics in 2001. Dr. Friend has also held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School from 1987 to 1995 and at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1990 to 1995. He received his B.A. in philosophy, his Ph.D. in biochemistry and his M.D. from Indiana University.
Eric E. Schadt PhD
Co-Founder, Director and Senior Advisor of Sage Bionetworks
Dr. Schadt is Chief Scientific Officer of Pacific Biosciences. He is an industry leader in network biology with a number of high-profile publications over the past 5 years that have energized the systems biology community. Dr. Schadt helped start Sage while Executive Scientific Director, Genetics at Rosetta Inpharmatics where he founded its Research Genetics Department after Rosetta was acquired by Merck in 2001. His extensive applications in systems biology have helped define the genetics of gene expression as a new field in statistical genetics. Prior to joining Rosetta Dr. Schadt was a Senior Research Scientist at Roche Bioscience. He received his B.S. in applied mathematics/computer science from California Polytechnic State University, and his M.A. in pure mathematics and his Ph.D. in bio-mathematics from UCLA.
Leland H. Hartwell PhD
Director of Sage Bionetworks
Dr. Hartwell is President and Director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Dr. Hartwell is involved in national and international projects to improve methods for discovering protein biomarkers for cancer believing that the most efficient path to reduce mortality from cancer is to identify individuals at high risk for disease and to detect cancer at an early stage when they can be cured. Dr. Hartwell shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his ground-breaking research identifying genes that control yeast cell cycle progression that have also been found to control cell division and cancer in humans. He has received many other honors including the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the Gairdner Foundation International Award , the Alfred P. Sloan Award in cancer research and Membership of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Hartwell earned a B.S. at the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He engaged in postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute and was an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine before joining the University of Washington faculty in 1968 and has been a Professor of Genetics and Genome Sciences there since 1973.
Dietrich Stephan PhD
Director of Sage Bionetworks
Dr. Stephan is Founder and CEO of the Ignite Institute for Individualized Health in the National Capital region. The non-profit institute is aimed at deep molecular sub-classification of common complex genetic diseases in the neurological, oncologic, metabolic, cardiovascular and pediatric areas. These molecular scanning efforts are disease followed by a new wave of exposure epidemiology and drug development on these molecularly homogenous newly defined disease classes. The outputs of the institute are rapidly chaperoned into the clinical setting in the form of companion diagnostics and drugs.
Dr. Stephan is a human geneticist who works to understand the root causes of common human diseases so that early diagnostics and interventions can be implemented. He has identified genes that predispose humans to disorders such as autism, exercise-induced heart attacks, sudden infant death syndrome, and a total of ten monogenic diseases. His group has begun to unravel over a dozen common "complex genetic" disorders using the latest genome scanning technologies such as high-density SNP genotyping and expression profiling. Dr. Stephan’s entrepreneurial activities have included co-founding Aueon Inc. a cancer diagnostic company, Amnestix Inc. a cognitive enhancer pharmaceutical company, and Navigenics Inc. which is a San Francisco biotechnology company that combines advances in genomics and sequencing technology to deliver heritable risk information to the point of care. Dr. Stephen received his B.S. at Carnegie-Mellon University, his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and trained as a fellow at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the NIH. Dr. Stephan was founding Chairman of the National Institutes of Health Neuroscience Microarray Consortium, and has previously held faculty appointments at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, George Washington University, and the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Dr. Stephan also serves on the board of directors of the Personalized Medicine Coalition.
Hans Wigzell MD DSc
Director of Sage Bionetworks
Professor Wigzell was President of the Karolinska Institute from 1995 to 2003. He was elected Chairman of the European Union Concerted Research Programme into AIDS vaccination in 1990. In 1993 he was appointed Secretary-General of the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control and has been a Chief Scientific Advisor to the Swedish Government and one of eleven appointed advisors on life science issues to the European Union Commissioner for Research. Professor Wigzell was appointed Chairman of the Nobel Assembly in 2000 and in 2002 he was appointed Chairman for the WHO-UNAIDS Vaccine Advisory Committee. Professor Wigzell received his MD and DSc from the Karolinska Institute and then joined the Swedish Cancer Society as a Special Cancer Scientist. He subsequently held senior faculty positions in the Department of Tumor Biology at the Karolinska Institute and in the Department of Immunology at Uppsala University Medical School. In 1982 he returned to the Karolinska as a Professor in the Department of Immunology and in 1988 became Director General of the National Bacteriological Laboratory in Stockholm. Professor Wigzell is an elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, the Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, EMBO, Academia Europea, and honorary member of the American Society for Immunology. Professor Wigzell has been awarded a number of prizes including the Anders Jahre Medical Prize, the Erik Fernström’s Prize for Young Scientists, the Russel Weiser Lecturer Prize and the Smith Lecture Award.
John Wilbanks
Director of Sage Bionetworks
Mr. Wilbanks is Vice President of Science at Creative Commons where he directs the Science Commons project. He came to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research & development. Previously he was the Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and also worked as a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Fortney (Pete) Stark. Mr. Wilbanks received a BA in Philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the Universite de Paris IV (La Sorbonne). He is a research affiliate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the project on Mathematics and Computation and serves on the Advisory Boards of the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central, the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Open Knowledge Definition, and the International Advisory Board of the Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities awards. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Fedora Commons digital repository organization.