DermTech Appoints BioStatistical Pioneer, John Quackenbush, Ph.D., as a Member of the Company's Scientific Advi...( LA JOLLA Calif. Oct. 10 /- DermTe...)

LA JOLLA, Calif., Oct. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- DermTech International, Inc., a biotechnology company developing skin sampling technologies for the early detection of melanoma and other diseases, today appointed John Quackenbush, Ph.D. to the company's Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Quackenbush is a Professor of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the Harvard School of Public Health. Since his 1992 receipt of a five-year fellowship from the National Center for Human Genome Research to study various aspects of genomics, Quackenbush has been widely recognized as a pioneer in the area of biological data management, analysis and interpretation.

"We are very pleased to welcome John to DermTech's SAB," said George Schwartz, the company's president and chief executive officer. "We are confident that his world-recognized expertise in bioinformatics, especially focused on class prediction algorithms for biomarker determination, will be a major asset as we accelerate the development of our EGIR-based assay for the early detection of melanoma." EGIR (Epidermal Genetic Information Retrieval) is DermTech's patented technology that uses noninvasive "tape-stripping" to identify the presence of disease. Other EGIR applications include drug development for products, such as anti-aging treatments and theranostics.

"I am looking forward to working with DermTech to help drive the development of what I expect will become a key new technique in the early detection of skin cancer and other diseases," said Quackenbush.

Dr. Quackenbush's work focuses on functional and comparative genomics and bioinformatics and their application to the study of human disease. Quackenbush is currently looking at patterns of gene expression in cancer, with the goal of elucidating the networks and pathways that are critical in the development and progression of the disease. He is also working
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