Advisors

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Dr. Urdea is Founder and Partner for Halteres Associates, a biotechnology-consulting firm based in Emeryville, California. He also founded and served as Chief Executive Officer of Tethys Bioscience, a proteomics-based diagnostics company that has been involved in the prevention of type-2 diabetes (assets acquired by HDL), and was CEO of Quantum Dots Corporation (assets acquired by Life Technologies). Additionally, Dr. Urdea is a founder and the Chairman of Catalysis Foundation for Health (CFH), a non-profit organization addressing gaps in global healthcare caused by inefficiencies in disease diagnosis and monitoring; CFH is developing potential biomarkers for tuberculosis bacterial load with a grant for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. Urdea is a member of the University of California at San Francisco Leadership Council for Global Health Sciences.  He serves as a consultant to the life sciences industry and is on the scientific advisory boards and boards of directors of a number of biotechnology and diagnostics companies. Early in his career, Dr. Urdea founded the Nucleic Acid Diagnostics business at Chiron Corporation, where he pioneered viral load assays for the human hepatitis B, hepatitis C and immunodeficiency viruses; his team introduced the first commercial viral load assays for all three viruses. Dr. Urdea also headed the Oncology Diagnostics business unit at Chiron. He then became SVP of the Molecular Diagnostics group and Chief Scientific Officer at Bayer Diagnostics. Dr. Urdea is an author of over 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications and has more than 125 issued and pending patents. In 2015, Dr. Urdea received a UCSF 150th Anniversary Alumni Excellence Award. 

Rich Thayer is Managing Partner of Halteres Associates, a bioscience  consultancy, and serves as a business, market and strategy advisor in  the biotechnology and life sciences sectors. He is also the Chief  Executive Officer of The Catalysis Foundation for Health, an  organization addressing gaps in global healthcare caused by  inefficiencies in disease diagnosis and monitoring. With more than 20  years’ experience in Biosciences, Mr. Thayer was previously Vice  President and Head of Business Development at Roche Molecular  Diagnostics, which included responsibility for strategic planning, and  was Vice President, Head of their $260MM Global Blood Screening Business  Unit. Prior to joining Roche, he co-founded and served as Chief  Financial Officer and a member of the Board of a medical diagnostics  company called Praxsys Biosystems. While at Praxsys, Mr. Thayer oversaw  finance, corporate and manufacturing operations and was an inventor on  two issued patents. He was also Director of the Blood Screening and  Infectious Disease Business Unit at Chiron Corporation where he managed  product development and manufacturing programs involving over 60  products and 200 employees. Mr. Thayer started his career at Chiron in  the DNA sequencing laboratory where he was a member of the hepatitis C  virus discovery team. He has an MBA from the Haas School of Business,  University of California, Berkeley and a BS in Biochemistry from the  University of California, Davis.  

 Director, Stanford Genome Technology Center Professor, Biochemistry and Genetics Stanford University School of Medicine 

Assistant Professor, Center for Vectorborne Diseases, and
Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California, Davis  

Former Deputy Director, HIV

Gates Foundation, 

former Professor

UCSF & UW School of Medicine