Scienega

Scienega was founded by Christian Burks in 2001. Dr. Burks is currently President & CEO of the Ontario Genomics Institute, a stand-alone not for profit company in Toronto that raises funds from federal, provincial, private and commercial sources to be deployed for genomics and proteomics research and development in Ontario. Over the past five years... , and including current projects funded over the next few years, OGI has developed a $500M portfolio of such projects. Previously, he was Chief Scientific Officer with Affinium Pharmaceuticals in Toronto. He oversaw research in a company which began with a focus on target discovery and characterization using functional and structural proteomics, and which then integrated forward into pre-clinical drug discovery based on a structure-guided drug discovery paradigm. During his tenure, the company entered into and exceeded milestones on a major target characterization and prioritization deal with a large pharmaceutical company. He also created a substantial viral proteomics program with funding from Genome Canada through the Ontario Genomics Institute. Prior to joining Affinium, Dr. Burks was Vice President and Chief Informatics Officer with Exelixis in South San Francisco. He established the Informatics Department and built it into a 40 person, multi-group department spread across four sites in the U.S.A. and Germany as the company grew from 25 to over 500 employees and through three corporate acquisitions and an IPO. The Informatics Department included bioinformatics and cheminformatics in the context of target and drug discovery for pharmaceutical, agricultural biology, and plant biotechnology applications. Prior to joining Exelixis, Dr. Burks was in the Theoretical Biology & Biophysics Group (T-10) at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was part of the team that created the NIH-funded global DNA sequence database resource, GenBank. He went on to serve as Principal Investigator for GenBank, Group Leader for T-10 (with a staff of 65 computational and mathematical ...Read More