Tom Burke, Ph.D.

Back to last page

For the past 10 years I have been a principal at PanVera Corporation in Madison, WI. During that period, the company grew from three founders to over 125 people in Madison and 25 people at a San Diego, CA facility. My position at PanVera was to oversee all aspects of the scientific operations, including manufacturing , research and development, and contract services to pharma and biotech. The scientific staff numbered about 65 at the end of 2002 including chemisty, molecular biology, fermentation, eukaryotic expression, protein purification, assay development and validation, quality assurance, processs development, and manufacturing. In addition to overseeing the technical aspects, my role was strongly focused on new product development and to review the legal, regulatory, technical, financial, and marketing assessments on new product ideas.

PanVera’s main products were human recombinant proteins that are therapeutic drug targets for screening chemical libraries. The proteins was often configured into fluorescent high throughput screening assays using fluorescence polarization (FP) or fluorescent resonance energy transfer (FRET). The assays were mainly configured with nuclear receptors, kinases, or proteases. PanVera was also a supplier of drug metabolism enzymes which are used by pharma to profile chemical compounds based on their metabolism in the liver. PanVera also supplied contract cloning and protein purification services to pharma and biotech and has worked with hundreds of proteins covering all the major therapeutic target areas.

As one of PanVera’s founders, I was an officer of the company and dealt closely with the Board of Directors and developing the strategic direction and crafting the operational plans for the company. I worked closely with PanVera’s investors during two rounds of financing and also secured funding through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) federal grant program. I played a significant role in selling PanVera to Aurora Biosciences (San Diego, CA) in 2001 and in the subsequent integration of the two companies. I was also heavily involved when Vertex Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge, MA) acquired Aurora Biosciences and PanVera in 2001 and transferred much of the technology from San Diego to Madison. One of my main roles in the acquisitions was to work with the legal departments to ensure that the technical aspects of the legal documents were correct.

Prior to starting PanVera, I worked at Promega Corporation in Madison for almost five years. Promega is a worldwide supplier of molecular biology and protein reagents to research and development scientists in academia and industry. At Promega, I worked on a very broad range of products including placental ribonuclease inhibitors, Taq DNA polymerase, nuclear transcription extracts, DNA and RNA modifying enzymes, restriction enzymes, and DNA sequencing kits. When I left Promega, I was the Director of Manufacturing, overseeing about 60 people in seven departments.