Addressing the antibody reproducibility crisis: A panel discussion with key scientific leaders

Aled Edwards is the founding CEO of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), an international public-private partnership that generates open-sourceresearch tools to support basic science and drug discovery. With 300 scientists within its laboratories in Campinas, Chapel Hill, Frankfurt, Oxford, Stockholm, and Toronto, the SGC has contributed ~15% of all the available structural information for human proteins in the public domain, and has generated chemical probes and validated antibodies that have helped identify new targets for cancer drug discovery. Al was also the founder of Affinium Pharmaceuticals, which was purchased by Debiopharm for its antibiotic program, as well as the Structure-guided Drug Discovery Coalition, a drug discovery partnership currently supported by the Gates Foundation. He is an advisor to Welcome and to a number of governments on Open Science. Al did his undergraduate and graduate work at McGill University and his postdoctoral work at Stanford University with Roger Kornberg, where he initiated the structural biology of RNA polymerase II. He is currently on faculty at the University of Toronto, the University of Oxford, and McGill University.

Matt is currently the Director of Strategy and Partnering for the Antibodies and Immunoassay business at Thermo Fisher Scientific. Previous to this role, he served as the head of research and development. He has more than 20 years of experience developing and validating antibodies for life science research. He started his career in custom antibody development serving both academic and pharmaceutical customers delivering more than 10,000 customized antibodies. Matt has also worked extensively in immunoassay development and advancing new platforms for the quantitative detection of proteins.

Anita is focused on establishing the means for communicating and utilizing the internet for effective scientific communication and discovery. She serves as the lead for the Resource Identification Initiative, a FORCE11, the Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship, group dedicated to transforming scholarly communication. FORCE was one of the drivers in open access movement and continues to drive innovation in understanding principles behind sharing and utilization of data, software and the role for identifiers. In addition, she is working in the area of knowledge representation in genomics for both Celera (coding the completed human genome into PANTHER) and Human Longevity (gene variants VaNDa), and the neurosciences within the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF), funded by the Blueprint for Neuroscience a pan-NIH initiative. She is also the scientific lead of the NIF project, the largest source of neuroscience data and tools on the web. The NIF framework has been extended to develop data portals for NIDDK (dkNET) and the RRID community portal, where authors are able to improve their manuscripts prior to submission for publication. This has led to the launching of a new company (SciCrunch) which is focused on improving interactions between academic scientists and the business community, both of which are major stakeholders and contributors in driving science forward.

Paul joined the staff of Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) in 2003, as Director of the Flow and Image Cytometry Resource. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cancer Prevention and Pathology and a Member of the Immunology Program. He is also an Associate Professor in the Departments of Pathology and of Biotechnical and Clinical Laboratory Sciences, University at Buffalo (SUNY). He earned his doctoral degree in Immunology at the Medical College of Pennsylvania (Drexel University), Philadelphia, PA, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Immunology at Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH in 1996 and remained at Dartmouth as an Assistant Professor until joining Roswell Park. Paul is an active member of the International Society for Analytical Cytometry (ISAC) and the International Clinical Cytometry Society. He has authored or co-authored more than 85 peer reviewed journal articles or book chapters and has over 190 Abstracts. He is also Director of the Annual Clinical Flow Cytometry course.

John is a Senior R&D Manager at Thermo Scientific where he manages the development of new reagents and kits for protein mass spectrometry research. John has an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Computer Science, and a PhD in Pharmacology from the University of Washington. John managed a bioinformatics group at Pfizer and a proteomics group at Abbott before joining Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2007. Since that time, John has led the development of new MS standards and calibrants, protein sample preparation reagents, and reagents for quantitative proteomic analysis, including Tandem Mass Tag reagents.

Christoph is currently the Vice President of R&D for Protein and Cell Analysis and Antibody and Immunoassay groups at Thermo Fisher Scientific. In the last 20+ years he has extensive industrial experience including serving as Vice President of R&D at BD Biosciences; as Global Technology Leader at the General Electric Global Research Center where he built the Global Technology Organization for Biosciences; as Vice President of Research within the Discovery Group at Amersham Biosciences; as Chief Scientific Officer at Xantos Biomedicine; and as Senior Scientist and Director of Technology Management for Boehringer Mannheim, Germany/Roche Diagnostics division, USA. Christoph received his doctorate in Molecular Cell Biology and Protein Chemistry from the University of Munich and postdoctoral training in Immunology, also at University of Munich.