James Cullem Oversees Start-Up of Three Biotechnology Companies

SAN FRANCISCO, California – January 29, 2014 – As a committed entrepreneur in the field of life sciences, James Cullem has to date founded a trio of start-up biotechnology firms in the past six years. He also served as the chief executive officer of these companies.

The three biotechnology firms co-founded and led by James Cullem include Sierra Glycomics, Inc., Halcyon Diagnostics, Inc. and Paradigm Oncology, Inc.

Halcyon Diagnostics

Halcyon Diagnostics was an early-stage oncology diagnostics and personalized medicine company focused on developing a first-and-best-in-kind “tumor-profiling” diagnostic test to help identify clinical trial therapy options for late-stage cancer patients.

Paradigm Oncology

Paradigm Oncology (ParadigmOncology.com) is an oncology diagnostics and personalized medicine company focused on developing a first-in-class “tumor-profiling” diagnostic test to identify potential targeted therapy options for glioblastoma patients. Glioblastoma is the most aggressive malignant brain tumor diagnosed in humans. Current treatment, including radiation, chemotherapy and surgery, provide limited therapeutic benefit, and the median survival for this patients is roughly only 12 months. When his mother-in-law passed away from glioblastoma, James Cullem became inspired to put his efforts into bringing the promise of personalized medicine to this terrible disease.

Sierra Glycomics

The latest development from James Cullem, Sierra Glycomics, is a special analytic services company focused on applying advanced mass spectrometry and bioinformatics methods to elucidating glycan structures to support the biofuels and drug development industries. It represents his first departure from the oncology and personalized medicine fields.  Glycomics is widely considered to be the next untapped area of potential discoveries leading to improved medicine, following on the heels of the advances in genomics and proteomics that occurred over the past decade.

Emergence of Personalized Medicine

James Cullem is a vocal advocate of personalized medicine, a relatively new development in healthcare that could revolutionize the methods with which patients receive therapeutic treatment. Researchers continue to elucidate molecular abnormalities that are underlying individual patients’ diseases, thus allowing the development of highly targeted new drugs against those abnormalities and the determination of which therapies promise to be most effective in treating them. According to James Cullem, the past decade has seen dramatic advances in the understanding of such molecular abnormalities, as well as an explosion in the number of targeted therapies currently in development and in clincial trials.

Cullem reports such advances have also led to an ongoing shift away from the characterization of disease by traditional pathological means towards a characteriztion based on the underlying molecular abnormalities, in order to better predict how the disease will respond to specific therapeutics irrespective of the tissue in which the disease originates.

Examples of Personalized Medicine

According to James Cullem, a prime example of advancements in tumor biology and personalized medicine is breast cancer. Breast cancer is now thought of, not as single cancer, but at least a dozen different cancers originating in the breast that can each be distinguished by a molecular profile common to patients having that specific type of breast cancer.  These sub-groups of patients will each respond to different drugs and therapeutic approaches, despite all being characterized as breast cancer.

Personalized medicine promises to move the healthcare system away from an outdated era of generalized treatments, reports James Cullem. Generalized treatments had previously been given to all patients suffering from a particular disease. James Cullem is encouraged by the modern era of highly-specific, patient-by-patient treatments that are based on new diagnostic tests to help identify specific abnormalities that are then treated with highly targeted, and often more efficacious, drugs.

James Cullem, J.D., B.S., is a longtime life sciences executive and entrepreneur who leverages his more than two decades of diverse experience to lead the formation and growth of businesses in their early stages.