Scientific Advisory Board

Willem 'Pim' Stemmer, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer, Avidia Research Institute, Mountain View, CA.
Dr. Stemmer invented MolecularBreeding™ and co-founded Maxygen Inc. in 1997 to develop the technology for application to pharmaceuticals, vaccines, chemistry and agriculture.  MolecularBreeding™ involves DNA recombination and functional selection to rapidly improve product candidates. Maxygen has spun off two other companies, Codexis Inc. to focus on chemistry and Verdia Inc. to focus on agricultural applications of MolecularBreeding™. Dr. Stemmer was Vice President, Research, at Maxygen until 2003 when he founded Avidia, Inc., which is focused on directed evolution of antibody-like products. He is also a scientific advisor for Surromed, Inc. and Codexis, Inc.
His research interests include:

• Approaches for rapid creation and optimization of product candidates for improved function in commercially relevant assays and with minimal new investment in information.
• Directed evolution and combinatorial optimization of small molecules, proteins, genes, multi-component pathways and whole genomes.
• Broadly mimicking Nature's design principles for genes and proteins in a variety of ways and applying these in innovative ways to the design of practical products in a cost-effective manner.

Dr. Stemmer was instrumental in getting $25M in DARPA grants for Maxygen.
In 1993, Dr. Stemmer invented and developed the DNA shuffling technology as a distinguished scientist at Affymax Research Institute.

From 1987 to 1992, Dr. Stemmer was a research scientist at Hybritech, Inc, working on antibody fragment engineering in E. coli and mammalian cells, focused on applications for cancer therapy. In 1992, he was awarded ‘scientist of the year’.
In 1985 Dr. Stemmer founded Genetic Designs, Inc., a company which pioneered three key technologies, peptide phage display, codon-based synthesis and antibody expression in E. coli.

Dr. Stemmer obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985 on bacterial virulence mechanisms, and he is the inventor on more than 70 issued patents and more than 150 pending applications. He has authored over 60 research publications and has given over 200 invited scientific lectures in many different fields. He has received the David Perlman Award and the Doisy Award.


Nathanael Gray, Ph.D., Director, Biological Chemistry, Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation, San Diego, CA.
Dr. Gray has since 2001 been responsible for discovery, optimization and characterization of novel protein kinase inhibitors at Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation. Dr. Gray is supervising a group of 30 researchers, who's efforts encompass both chemical and biological aspects of basic research and drug discovery projects.

Dr. Gray joined Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation as Staff Scientist in 1999 after achieving his Ph.D. in chemistry from the Department of Chemistry, University of California at Berkeley.

Dr.Gray has authored or co-authored 27 peer-reviewed scientific papers.


Thue W. Schwartz, Ph.D., MD, Prof. of Molecular Pharmacology, University of Copenhagen, Co-founder and CSO, 7TM Pharma.
Thue W. Schwartz is a Prof. of Molecular Pharmacology at the University of Copenhagen, and he is CSO of 7TM Pharma. Previously, he was Research Professor at the Danish Medical Research Council and in the early nineties Research Director in corporate research at Novo Nordisk A/S where he was leading departments of computational chemistry, molecular genetics, and molecular pharmacology.

Prof. Schwartz has published approx. 190 scientific papers (8 of which in Nature or Science) and has received many prices and honors including the Jahre Price (Oslo 1990), the Viktor Mutt award (Santa Barbara, 1994), the Lundbeck Foundation price and the Novo Nordisk Foundation price (2001). He has since 1994 been a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. Prof. Schwartz has served as board of directors of several biotech companies, including Profound Pharma A/S - of which he was also a co-founder - and has served on the scientific advisory board of several Biotech companies including Acadia (San Diego, CA), ChemoCentryx (San Carlos, CA) and has been on the advisory board for BankInvest since 1992 and for the biotech venture funds of BankInvest since 1997. Prof. Schwartz is currently a member of the scientific advisory board of AnorMED (Langley, BC, Canada) and is on the editorial board of a number of scientific journals including Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology. Prof. Schwartz has an MD from University of Copenhagen, trained in protein chemistry at University of Aarhus, was postdoc at Department of Biochemistry at The University of Chicago and holds a D.M.Sc. from University of Copenhagen.