Two Prominent Scientists Join Ampio Pharmaceuticals Scientific Advisory Board (SAB)

Pablo Rubinstein, MD., a surgeon and immunogeneticist by training, is the founder and director, of the National Cord Blood Program at the New York Blood Center (NYBC), where he developed the first public cord blood banking system. He has played a leading role in international cord blood transplantation in which the stem cells from the placental and umbilical cord blood of unrelated donors are used to treat, by transplantation, leukemia, lymphoma and other neoplastic diseases of the blood.  More than seventy (70) genetic diseases, such as Hurler's disease, Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID), Severe Aplastic Anemia and Sickle Cell disease have been treated successfully with cord blood transplantation.  His peer reviewed publications teaching the processing methods he developed and generous training of an international fellowship of physicians and blood bankers at the NYBC cell processing laboratory have stimulated and led to the establishment of more than 100 public cord blood banks in thirty (30) countries and an inventory of more than 600,000 cryogenically stored cord blood units from ethnically diverse donors.  These cord blood banks have provided most of the over thirty thousand cord blood transplants to date.  

Milestones accomplished by Dr. Rubinstein and his team in the development of this new field of medicine include providing the 1st unrelated stem cell transplant for hematopoietic reconstitution, receiving the 1st IND from the FDA that allowed cord blood processing and freezing for transplantation to proceed (1996) and, in November 2011, the first Biologics License issued by the FDA for any stem cell preparation.

Dr. Rubinstein earned his M.D. degree from the Universidad de Chile in 1962 and completed a surgical residency at Hospital Clinico of the Universidad de Chile, followed by a fellowship at the M.I. Bassett Hospital, Columbia University. He also completed a National Institutes of Health (NIH)  International Postdoctoral Research fellowship at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. His study of immunogenetics, which encompasses the structure and function of genes that regulate immune responses, control the acceptance or rejection of tissue and organ transplants, and affect susceptibility to certain types of diseases, led to his appointment as an investigator at the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute at the New York Blood Center (NYBC) and eventually as Director of the Fred H. Allen Jr. Laboratory of Immunogenetics. He served as Clinical Professor in the Pathology Department at Columbia University School of Medicine.

He has also conducted collaborative research on the Genetics of Juvenile (Type I) Diabetes Mellitus in humans and showed that the disease is inherited as a recessive gene with incomplete penetrance through genes in the HLA region.  He has also conducted studies on the genetic structure of the HLA region in humans and its homologs in other species and shown the linkage of several components of the complement system including Factor B in the alternative pathway and C2 and C4, active in the classical pathway.

He has also worked in the genetics of human blood groups and discovered the existence of Fy6, and allele of the Duffy blood group system that serves as the receptor for the binding of P. vivax malaria merozoites.

Dr. Rubinstein is the author of more than 200 research papers on immunogenetics, cord blood banking and transplantation.

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Edward N. Brody, M.D., Ph.D., a physician, molecular biologist, biochemist and biophysicist by training, is the Chief Medical Officer Emeritus of SomaLogic Inc. and Adjunct Professor, Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology; University of Colorado, Boulder.  Dr. Brody served as Vice-President, Drug Discovery, NeXstar Pharmaceuticals, Boulder, Colorado 1998-1999 and has been working in proteomics at SomaLogic since its inception in 2000. Proteomics is a branch of biotechnology concerned with applying the techniques of molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics to analyzing the structure, function, and interactions of the proteins produced by the genes of a particular cell, tissue, or organism, with organizing the information in databases, and with applications of the data. The company has developed protein-binding reagents and technologies that can efficiently, accurately and rapidly identify and quantify 1,129 proteins across approximately eight logs of concentration in small sample volumes that support advanced biomarker discovery, diagnostics development, and pharmaceutical discovery and development.

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Dr. Brody earned his M.D.(1964) and Ph.D. Biochemistry (1965) from the University of Chicago and accepted a Postdoctoral Fellow position at the Department of Biophysics, Laboratory of E.P. Geiduschek in Chicago. He then went to Geneva, Switzerland (1965-1968) and continued his research as a Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Molecular Biology. Dr. Brody moved from Geneva to the Biochemistry Department of the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, Paris, France and joined the French National Research Council (C.N.R.S.) in 1971 as "Chargé de Recherche" and was promoted to the position of "Maître de Recherche" in 1973.  In 1983, Dr. Brody took a sabbatical to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, working in John Abelson's laboratory studying the splicing of pre-mRNA in S. cerevisiae and was able to label, isolate, and prove the structure of an in vivo generated lariat intron RNA and then found that in vitro splicing takes place specifically on a 40S particle which he named the spliceosome.  Their article in Science (228, 963-7, [1986]) was one of the 100 most cited life science articles for the year 1985.

Returning to France in August, 1985, Dr. Brody worked on mammalian pre-mRNA splicing, and in particular on tissue specific splicing, skeletal muscle-specific splicing of b-tropomyosin pre-mRNA and in 1988, moved to Gif-sur-Yvette, where splicing was the major pursuit of the laboratory. In 1992, Dr. Brody was recruited to become Professor, Chairman Department of Biology, Department of Biological Sciences SUNY Buffalo, USA.

Dr. Brody is the author of a large number of research papers in the field of molecular biology and proteomics.