11 April 2019 - - US-based metagenomics technology company IDbyDNA has appointed two new members to its scientific advisory board, Dr. Eddy Rubin and Dr. Alan T. Wright, the company said.

The IDbyDNA SAB is comprised of world leaders in infectious diseases, human and microbial genomics, medical microbiology and bioinformatics.

The advisory board serves as a strategic resource for IDbyDNA as it advances the application of its Explify platform, a comprehensive, diagnostic-grade technology used to profile tens of thousands of microorganisms, including pathogens and the human microbiome, among its partners around the world.

IDbyDNA scientific advisory board members include Carrie L. Byington, M.D., is a national leader in pediatrics and infectious disease and serves as Dean of the Texas A and M College of Medicine, senior vice president of the Texas A and M University Health Science Center and vice Chancellor for Health Services at The Texas A and M University System.

Byington was previously the H.A. and Edna Benning presidential Professor of Pediatrics, vice Dean for Academic Affairs and Faculty Development in the School of Medicine, and Associate vice president for Faculty and Academic Affairs at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center during a 21-year career at the University of Utah.

Byington is board certified in both General Pediatrics and Pediatric Infectious Diseases. She received a Bachelor of Science in biology from Texas A and M University and Doctor of Medicine from Baylor College of Medicine.

Gene Myers is a computer scientist and biotechnologist known for the BLAST search engine and the sequencing of the human genome.

He currently serves as the managing director of the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG). Previously, Dr. Myers had been a group leader at the HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus since its inception in 2005. Before that he was on the faculty of Computer Science at UC Berkeley from 2003 to 2005.

Myers was formerly vice president of Informatics Research at Celera Genomics where he and his team determined the sequences of the Drosophila, Human, and Mouse genomes using the whole genome shotgun technique that he advocated in 1996.

Prior to that Dr. Myers was on the faculty of the University of Arizona for 17 years. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, USA, the National Academy of Germany, and was awarded the ACM Kannellakis Prize in 2002. Dr. Myers received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado.

Dr. George Weinstock is a professor and director of Microbial Genomics at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine where he established a group devoted to genomic studies of infectious diseases and the human microbiome.

Prior to joining the Jackson Laboratory, Dr. Weinstock served as Associate director of The Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition, he was Co-director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center, and Professor of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Weinstock received his B.S. from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. John W.A. Rossen is a Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands where he currently leads the Personalized Microbiology Research Group which focuses on implementing metagenomics and metatranscriptomics in the clinical setting.

He also serves as Head of the Molecular Unit. Under his leadership the group has successfully utilized next generation sequencing to detect and characterize pathogens, reveal new antibiotic resistance mechanisms, prevent infection and improve risk assessment, and to develop novel targeted diagnostic tests.

In his 30 years in molecular virology and molecular microbiology, Dr. Rossen has published more than 155 peer reviewed studies. He currently serves as the secretary of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) study group for genomic and molecular diagnostics and treasurer of the Dutch Society of Medical Microbiology.

Dr. Eddy Rubin is a geneticist and medical researcher whose research includes a series of pioneering studies in the field of human and microbial genomics.

While serving as director of the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, his team made significant contributions to the Human Genome Project and the sequencing and analysis of thousands of plant, fungal and microbial genomes. In 2016 he joined Metabiota, a company focused on applying comprehensive risk analytics, as chief scientific officer to help organizations understand and mitigate infectious disease risk

received a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from the University of California San Diego and his M.D. and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Rochester. He completed his medical residency in pediatrics, and his clinical training in Human Genetics at the University of California San Francisco.

Alan Wright is the chief medical officer at Roche Diagnostics Corp.

Prior to joining Roche, Wright served as senior vice president of Health Improvement at Caris Life Sciences where he directed managed care and reimbursement strategy and created an enterprise-wide regulatory and advocacy strategy.

Before joining Caris, Dr. Wright held executive management positions in the health insurance, pharmaceutical and pharmacy benefit management industries. Dr. Wright received a Bachelor of Science in pre-medicine from Penn State University, an MD from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a Master of Public Health from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

IDbyDNA has developed transformative metagenomics technology to simultaneously profile tens of thousands of microorganisms and pathogens in any sample.

Its Explify Platform integrates into medical laboratories to deliver actionable information to healthcare providers. Working with our global partners, we are setting the standard for the identification and understanding of microorganisms and their role in human health.