Artemis Health Inc announces that Richard Rava, PhD, has joined Artemis Health in the newly created position of senior vice president of research and development.

"Rich’s depth and breadth of research, development and manufacturing experience, together with his proven track record in commercializing genetic analysis tools, makes him uniquely suited to lead our efforts to bring non-invasive prenatal diagnostic tests to the market," said Lissa Goldenstein, president and chief executive officer of Artemis Health.

Dr Rava brings more than 20 years of research, development and operational expertise in molecular and genetic analysis for commercial assays and instrumentation. He comes to Artemis after 16 years at Affymetrix where he was a scientific co-founder and most recently senior vice president of research and development.

During his tenure, Dr. Rava led the research, development and manufacturing scale-up of the Affymetrix’ GeneChip® technology. He was responsible for the delivery of multiple products involving complex assays, microarrays, instrumentation, and software that applied scientific technology to meet the needs of the gene expression, genetics research and clinical markets.

Prior to co-founding Affymetrix, Dr Rava served as a senior scientist at Affymax Research Institute. From 1990 through 1992, he served as principal research scientist at the George R. Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During that time, he was also the research coordinator for the National Institute of Health Laser Biomedical Research Center at MIT. Dr. Rava has published over 60 papers in peer-reviewed scientific publications and is an author on over 30 issued U.S. patents. He received his BA and PhD, in chemistry from Rutgers University.

"Artemis Health is the only company focused exclusively on the development of non-invasive prenatal tests to determine genetic abnormalities using both intact cell and cell-free fetal DNA analysis tools," remarked Dr. Rava. "I am extremely excited to join this highly-committed team, and look forward to playing an active role in the rapidly evolving field of prenatal diagnostics."

Souce: PRNewswire