Dr. Vernon Oi

Chairman

Dr. Vernon Oi is a world-renowned Immunologist with over 200 peer reviewed publications and patents. 

He received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and doctoral degree from the Stanford University School of Medicine. In addition, he studied in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California at Berkeley and the Medical Research Council and Agricultural Research Council in the UK before joining the Stanford University faculty in the Department of Genetics. 

As a research faculty member in Stanford’s Genetics Department, Dr. Oi and his colleagues made break-through discoveries that set the course for what is now a department of 45 faculty members and the top ranked Genetics department in the USA.  Much of this ascension to US & global prominence is a result of Dr. Oi’s discoveries and patented research. Dr. Oi is the co-inventor of two patents that are part of Stanford University’s top 5 largest revenue producing patents in its history. 

One of these patents is for Phycobiliproteins. Phycobiliproteins, proteins that occur naturally in algae, have been extensively used in the biotechnology research community as fluorescent tags for the tiny beacons of light they emit. Invented by Professor Lubert Stryer of Stanford, Professor Alexander Glazer of the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Vernon Oi of Stanford, the technology was licensed exclusively to Applied Biosystems (Thermo Fisher Scientific) and Becton Dickinson. This research resulted in the development of fluorescence-activated cell sorting appliances a market now valued at over $ 400 million.

Another of Dr. Oi’s Stanford patents is for Functional Antibodies. A process for generating functional antibodies, developed by Stanford inventors Leonard Herzenberg and Vernon Oi in collaboration with Sherie Morrison, formerly of Columbia University, is currently Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing highest royalty producer.

Dr. Oi’s invention is used to produce drugs to treat a wide variety of diseases. Products include Remicade (Johnson & Johnson), Synagis (MedImmune) and others. In 2017 Remicade was the 6th most valuable pharmaceutical with annual sales of $6.4 billion.  In 2019 functional antibodies produced over $150 billion in revenues.

In 2017 Dr. Oi led a group that obtained one of Hawai’i’s eight medicinal cannabis licenses. The company, Hawaiian Ethos, LLC, has since specialized developing non-pulmonary and highly reproducible micro-dosing technologies.

Leonore A. Herzenberg, D.Sc.

Stanford Flow Cytometry Chair in Genetics | Stanford Professor of Genetics | Stanford Professor of the Interdepartmental Program in Immunology

The laboratory that Leonore led with her late husband, Leonard A. Herzenberg has made many seminal contributions to immunoglobulin heavy chain (IgH) genetics and to functional analyses and lineage studies of mouse and human B and T cells. In addition, of principal interest to studies proposed here, their many “firsts” include the initial development of the Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorter (FACS), the development of the first monoclonal antibody reagents for FACS, and the continued development and improvement of computer support for the acquisition, analysis, display and storage of flow cytometry data. Although Len alone is commonly credited for this FACS development work, the joint authorship for the majority of their published studies in this area better reflects Leonore and Len’s  well-balanced collaborative effort, in which Len focused more on hardware development and FACS commercialization while Leonore focused more on biological applications and computer support for FACS data analysis and storage.

After Len died in 2013, Leonore has assumed a progressively greater share of the administration and scientific leadership in the lab, aided in no small part by long-term collaborators (David Parks, Wayne Moore, Stephen Meehan and Guenther Walther, currently chair of the Stanford Department of Statistics). 

The flow cytometry side of Leonore’s work centers mainly on the development of a knowledge-based, statistically valid, automated software that facilitates and improves the accuracy of high- dimensional (Hi-D) FACS in research and clinical settings. She plans to continue this trajectory, focusing both on the software development efforts and on biomedical studies, in using the advanced Hi-D FACS analysis and sorting methods to define two murine hematopoietic lineages, only one of which derives from BM HSC. Further, coupling these methods with IgH deep sequencing, key functional differences between the two lineages have been revealed. This technology is now being used to explore the recently developed humanized mouse model and to expand work conducted in other laboratories with human samples relevant to HIV and other diseases. These paradigm-setting biomedical studies have clearly benefited from access to the state-of-the-art flow methods that have been developed by Leonore and her team, and in turn have opened new challenges and provided a realistic testing ground for our software development efforts. This symbiotic relationship will continue. 

Jian Han, MD, PhD

HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology Faculty Investigator 

Jian Han, MD, PhD, is a faculty investigator at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. Han has more than 30 years of experience developing molecular diagnostic technologies and products. He is interested in developing integrated solutions for molecular differential diagnosis and developing a technology platform that allows multiplex molecular differential diagnoses to be carried out in a fashion that is high throughput, semi-quantitative, automatic, and in a closed system. He studies the immunorepertoire of different autoimmune diseases and cancers using multiplex PCR and high-throughput gene sequencing. 

As the director of the R10K project, Han leads a team that is sequencing 10,000 samples and studying biomarkers for 100 diseases. He earned his MD from ShuZhou Medical College in China in 1983 and his PhD in clinical molecular genetics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1991. He was founder, CEO and CSO of Geneco Biomedical Products before joining HudsonAlpha in 2007. He founded two HudsonAlpha associate companies, iRepertoire and iCubate, in 2009.