Team

Dr. Hui Ge, president and founder, AscentGene, Inc. For the past seven years, Dr. Ge was the senior vice president and chief scientific officer of ProteinOne, a biotechnology company in Bethesda. During that period, he won 1.4 million dollars of government funding for ProteinOne’s R&D and helped the company become a world-leading protein company. Dr. Ge received his Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry from Columbia University in New York, where he identified and cloned the first alternative splicing factor ASF from human cells. He then obtained his postdoctoral training in Dr. Robert Roeder’s laboratory at Rockefeller University, where he identified and cloned the first general transcriptional coactivator and established an in vitro transcription system reconstituted with highly purified transcription factors. Before starting ProteinOne, Dr. Ge headed the Unit on Transcriptional Mechanisms at NIH. Over the past 25 years, Dr. Ge has been invited to be a manuscript reviewer for a number of scientific journals, a grant reviewer for the NIH study section and the England Wellcome Foundation, and a member of the scientific advisory committees for many international conferences. Dr. Ge has published 34 research articles in top journals including Cell, Science, Molecular Cell, PNAS, EMBO J., and J. Biol. Chem.. He has also invented three patented technologies.

Dr. David X. He, chief financial officer. Dr. He has had extensive education and experience in the biomedical and financial fields. He obtained his M.D. from Peking Union Medical College, his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Rochester, and his MBA from Johns Hopkins University. Dr. He was a senior scientist at the National Institutes of Health and has published more than 30 research papers in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. He was a first vice president of wealth management at the Smith Barney/Citigroup before joining AGI.

Dr. Andrey R. Pavlov, senior scientist. Dr. Pavlov is a biochemist with 28 years of experience in the fields of immunochemistry, enzymology, protein and nucleic acid chemistry, molecular biology, and quantitative bioanalytical assays. He got his MS in chemistry from School of Chemistry at M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University and then his PhD in chemical sciences (biological chemistry and chemical kinetics) from A.N.Belozersky Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Bioorganic Chemistry at M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia. His postdoctoral work was done at A.N. Bakh Institute of Biochemistry of Russian Academie of Science and then at Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston and at Tulane University in New Orleans. Dr. Pavlov was a senior scientist at Fidelity Systems, Inc. carrying out development of new PCR and DNA sequencing technologies before joining AscentGene. He published 30 papers in top peer-revieved journals, including PNAS, J. Mol. Biol., and J. Biol. Chem. and wrote chapters in several books. He is also an author of a patent and patent applications

Dr. Nick Yan, advisor on research and development. Dr. Yan obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cornell, his MBA in pharmaceutical-chemical studies from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and his postdoctoral training from Roche. With many years of industry experience in R&D, Dr. Yan currently serves in the executive committee of the Sino-American Pharmaceutical Association (SAPA). He was previously affiliated with Bristol-Myers Squibb, where he led several cross-function teams in multiple therapeutic areas.

Louis J. Cantolupo, advisor on business development. Mr. Cantolupo has 15 years of life science experience, both at the benchtop and in business development. He is a founder of Omnia Biologics, a contract manufacturing firm, and has held business development roles where he was responsible for product and platform partnering with several public and private companies, including GenVec, Inc. and Crucell Holland BV. His laboratory experience includes work with recombinant adenoviruses and retroviruses used for gene therapy applications. He holds a B.S. in biotechnology from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MBA from the Smith School of Business.