Education
Dr. Scanlon received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology studying the regulation of messenger RNA at the University of London, London, England. His Post-Doctoral training in Cancer Molecular Pharmacology at Yale School of Medicine New Haven, CT. He won both a Leukemia Society of America Fellowship and a Leukemia Scholar Award. Dr. Scanlon career has been in the fields of cancer drug resistance and cancer gene therapy.
Medical Research
His research involved training of thirty national and international Post-Doctoral Fellows. He was the Co-Founder and Co-Editor of the journal Cancer Gene Therapy (1994-2014) and was the President of the International Society of Cancer Gene Therapy. His laboratory research involved developing viral vectors (retro and adeno viruses) for delivery of anti-cancer ribozymes for treating human tumors. Prior work had established the utility of anti-oncogene ribozymes to reverse the malignant phenotype of human melanoma and human bladder carcinoma in vivo. This research was presented at the 400th Anniversary of Uppsala University, Sweden (1995) where ten invited international speakers discussed their newest medical advances. The initial research of this program involved elucidating the biochemical mechanism for synergistic combination cancer chemotherapy in patients (cisplatin/5-flurouracil), which lead to the optimization of DNA damaging agents with nucleoside analogues (AZT and Gemcitabine). This work was awarded the Paul Martini International Medical Research Prize in Bonn, Germany. He has published over 135 peer-reviewed papers in the field of cancer and has seven issued patents on his research. He has been a reviewer and committee chairman for the National Institute of Health, including reviewing grants on the SBIR study section, R01 investigator grants and Cancer Center Program Projects.
Pharmaceutical Industry
Dr. Scanlon was a senior vice-president at Berlex Biosciences, a division of Schering AG in Berlin, Germany from 1996-2000. He was responsible for developing their international cancer program, which involved developing medical products for diagnostics, small molecules and gene therapy projects. Dr. Scanlon has extensive management skills for creating, planning, organizing and implementing complex scientific programs with internal and external collaborations by identifying and validating clinical candidates for development with the FDA and marketing strategies.
Teaching
As a faculty member at both UCLA School of Management in Los Angeles and Northeastern University, he has taught an entrepreneur course that focuses on helping actual university ventures improve their strategies to achieve external funding. The course teaches frameworks for considering target markets, customer segmentation, product design and validations, venture team assessments, as well as business and financial models. The Northeastern University students (~500) have applied these methods to improve the business plans for new ventures in the past four years. Working in teams, students design and administer customer surveys, create detailed financial projections, and create investor packages. This will include a due diligence package, a term sheet, and a power-point presentation for investors. University companies (~95) have been taken from multiple areas across the campus, including different technologies and services. Overall, the course is a practicum on what it takes to get new venture concepts funded and launched from the perspective of the entrepreneur, the customer, and the investor.
Investment Groups
For the past 15 years, Dr. Scanlon has been involved with the angel investment community on both the west coast and east coast. He has been Chairman of the Pasadena Angels with ~100 investors that funded over 50 companies for $9.0 MM in two years and an executive member of the Tech Coast Angels in Los Angeles. He has also been an investment advisor to Sky Ventures in Boston for the past five years.
CEO
Dr. Scanlon has been using his academic and business experience to mentor creative scientific ideas with good business practices to generate novel medical products. The entrepreneurs from academia are supported by his investment groups with a strong management team and venture capital to make the successful transition from concept into a productive enterprise. He has been CEO of four startup companies and Myriad Genetics acquired Melanoma Diagnostics in 2010.
Expert Witness
As an expert witness, he has been retained by a Boston Law firm to serve as an expert witness on an intellectual property case. He has provided opinions on investor fundraising and financing of biotechnology start-ups as it relates to provisions of their client’s license agreements.
Board
He has also helped support the development of entrepreneur businesses within the Bioscience Community. From 2000, Dr. Scanlon has been on the Scientific Advisory Board for the first European Biotechnology Institute in Dublin, Ireland. In addition, he has sat on several start up biotechnology companies.
We are on the threshold of a medical revolution for the diagnosis and treatment of human disease. My mission is to integrate creative knowledge of science with the core discipline of business strategies. Hopefully, we will be able to treat human disease better in the future.
