Human genome pioneer J. Craig Venter, who disclosed last month he’s being treated for prostate cancer, is moving into a new role as executive chairman at Human Longevity (HLI), the San Diego genomics startup he co-founded in 2013. Cynthia Collins, who previously led GE Healthcare’s cell therapy and purification and analysis businesses, is replacing Venter as CEO, according to a statement from HLI today.
In the statement, Venter hails Collins for her “wide-ranging experience in leading and growing commercial operations for privately-held and publicly-traded life science businesses.” Before joining GE Healthcare in 2013, Collins was CEO at Genvec, a group vice president at Beckman Coulter, CEO of Sequoia Pharmaceuticals, and president of Clinical Micro Sensors, (now Genmark), a Motorola subsidiary.
As executive chairman, Venter will remain in a daily role leading the scientific strategy and direction of HLI. At the time Venter founded HLI (with X Prize founder Peter Diamandis and Robert Hariri of Celgene Cellular Therapeutics), he was also serving as CEO of San Diego-based Synthetic Genomics. Venter moved to executive chairman and co-chief scientist at Synthetic Genomics in 2014, when the company named Oliver Fetzer as CEO.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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