SALT LAKE CITY, March 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Ventana Genetics, Inc. today
announced that M. Scott Salka has been appointed to the position of Chief
Executive Officer.  Mr. Salka comes to Ventana from Sequana Therapeutics, a
leading genomics company, where he was Vice President of Operations and Chief
Financial Officer.
    "Mr. Salka has extensive experience in the management of emerging
companies as well as in building the commercial value of innovative
technologies," stated Dennis B. Farrar, President and Chairman of the Board of
Ventana.  "We are excited to welcome Mr. Salka to our management team and look
forward to his leadership as we begin to develop strategic alliances and
exploit Ventana's genetic technologies to identify new drug targets and lead
compounds."
    As the Vice President of Operations and Chief Financial Officer of Sequana
Therapeutics, Mr. Salka directed Sequana's strategic planning and corporate
development efforts, which included raising capital and structuring industry
collaborations.  Mr. Salka participated in the start-up of Sequana in 1993 and
was instrumental in raising over $25 million in three rounds of private
funding and nearly $50 million in two public equity financings for Sequana, as
well as negotiating four industry collaborations worth up to $250 million.
Previously, Mr. Salka served as a Financial Analyst for The BF Goodrich
Company and for Unisys Corporation.  He holds a B.S. degree in Finance from
San Diego State University and an M.S. in Industrial Administration from
Carnegie Mellon University.
    Ventana Genetics, Inc. is a biotechnology company utilizing powerful new
somatic cell genetic technologies to discover highly validated drug targets
based on their biological activity in disease-specific human cell assays --
the most relevant disease model for identifying human drug targets.  Combining
genetic technologies with high-throughput screening enables Ventana to rapidly
identify those points in disease pathways most susceptible to therapeutic
intervention.  These technologies facilitate screens for small molecules that
bind to drug targets. Ventana's function-based assays use "perturbagens,"
proprietary molecules that disrupt the physiological functions of critical
proteins in human cells, to identify novel targets for drug discovery.
Utilizing perturbagen libraries (the biological equivalent of combinatorial
chemical libraries), together with its high-throughput screening technologies,
Ventana can bypass the biological complexities that hamper conventional target
discovery efforts.  To accelerate the perturbagen-based target discovery
process, Ventana has developed a proprietary, high-throughput system that
includes Fluorescence-Activated Bead Sorting (FABS), Fluorescence-Activated
Cell Sorting (FACS) and cis FACS genetics, and its recently-developed
Validator technology to rapidly isolate highly validated drug targets.
Although Ventana's somatic cell genetics approach is designed to be compatible
with small molecule drug discovery, it can also be adapted to identify
therapeutic proteins and DNA sequences tailor-made for gene therapy.

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