Alan Bullock appointed chairman of Scienion

CEO Holger Eickhoff declared: "We are pleased that an authority recognised in the industry has decided to join our biotechnology company.

"Thanks to Alan's experience, contacts and strategic-conceptional abilities, Scienion will be able to expand its market positions achieved for microarrays and continue with its internationally successful operations".

Bullock comes from England, where he trained and earned his PhD as a nuclear physicist.

After various stations in companies in the semiconductor industry, he switched into the biotechnology sector of Leica Microsystems.

Close contacts between Alan Bullock and the Scienion team resulted primarily during his tenure as director of the German headquarters of Packard BioScience (USA), one of the world's leading manufacturers of device systems, reagents and services for the life sciences industry.

Bullock has worked with the Berlin biotech company since May 2002 as a management and strategy consultant in the areas of marketing and sales.

"For me Scienion is an exciting challenge, as here the scientific expertise of the team is combined with an technology platform as well as products in demand and reliable service - all of these are excellent sales arguments," the new chairman stated, looking forward to his new job.

Also effective immediately, the two new directors for research and development, Eckhard Nordhoff and Volker Heiser, will take over the Scienion array hardware and chip manufacturing divisions.

While Nordhoff is one of the inventing fathers of the platform technology implemented for the manufacture of 2D/3D microarrays at Scienion and belongs to the pioneers of biological mass spectrometry, the molecular biologist Heiser counts among his achievements as director of the drug screening group at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics (Dr Lehrach's department) the development of an automated screening platform for massively parallel analyses.