Issued – Thursday 24 January 2008, London, UK

GlaxoSmithKline has appointed Lon Cardon to head its Genetics organisation. Lon will combine Pharmacogenetics and Medical Genetics as a single, integrated function. The primary focus of the new organisation will be to focus on the prediction of individual variations in drug response as well as to support new disease target identification and validation.

Patrick Vallance, Senior Vice President, Drug Discovery commented, “Human disease genetics has made several major breakthroughs in the last 2-3 years. Large consortia have identified genetic variants with robust and reproducible disease modifying effects. The challenge now is to integrate these advances into drug discovery and development and to determine whether common genetic variants can meaningfully impact how we should use medicines to optimise benefit and reduce risk. We have recruited a leading scientist from the gene-disease arena to apply his experience and insights to the next major genetic challenge – pharmacogenetics”.

Lon joins GSK from the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center, where he was Co-director of the Herbold Computational Biology Program and from the University of Washington, where he was Professor of Biostatistics. Prior to these appointments, Lon was Professor of Bioinformatics and a Wellcome Trust Principal Fellow at the University of Oxford, where he was responsible for gene-discovery activities in a number of multinational studies of common human diseases, such as the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium and the NIH Coordinating Center for the Genes and Environment Initiative. Earlier in his career Lon was Senior Director of Bioinformatics & Statistical Genetics at Axys Pharmaceuticals and Director of Statistical Genetics at Sequana Therapeutics.