Changes on Metabolic board

Prof Peter Darvall has resigned from his board position at Melbourne drug discovery company Metabolic Pharmaceuticals due to his commitments as vice-chancellor of Monash University.

Taking his place is Dr Roland Scollay, the president and CEO of California company Genteric, who is in the process of moving back to Australia from the USA to become the director of commercialisation at Monash's Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences.

Metabolic chairman Dr Arthur Emmett said Darvall had been an inaugural director of the company and had been instrumental in its start-up phase.

"He has also been of great assistance in the management of our relationship with Monash University, where the company's obesity and type II diabetes drugs originated in the laboratories run by Assoc Prof Frank Ng," Emmett said.

He said Scollay's skills and experience, particularly his senior roles in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, would be of significant benefit to Metabolic.

Scollay has been vice-president of research at two other US biotechnology companies, SyStemix and Genetic Therapy Inc, which were later merged by parent company Novartis. After the merger, he became the head of cell and gene therapy research at Novartis, and was also a member of the Novartis Research Management Board, which oversees Novartis' worldwide pharmaceutical research activities.

In Australia, Scollay spent 14 years as a scientist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, and was deputy director of the Centenary Institute of Cancer Medicine and Cell Biology at the University of Sydney.