About David H. Persing

David obtained a BA degree in Biochemistry from San Jose State University in 1979, and obtained a combined MD-PhD degree (Medical Scientist Training Program) from the University of California, San Francisco in 1988. His doctoral thesis research on hepatitis B virus was conducted in the Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics under thesis coadvisors Don Ganem and nobel laureate Harold Varmus. He completed his residency in Laboratory Medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine, and then joined the Laboratory Medicine and Pathology Staff at the Mayo Clinic. At Mayo Rochester, he founded the Molecular Microbiology laboratory with the goal of bringing leading-edge molecular diagnostics to the diagnosis of infectious diseases. He also established several extramurally funded research programs to study Lyme disease and other tick-borne infections.

In 1999, against the medical advice of his Mayo colleagues, he decided to leave the eternal security of a tenured position and take a walk on the wild side of the biotech. Ultimately as Chief Scientific Officer at Corixa corporation in Seattle, he led several multidisciplinary research teams focused on innate immunity, vaccine development, and molecular diagnostics for infectious diseases and cancer. Corixa was acquired in 2005 by Glaxo Smithkline; he joined Cepheid as Chief Medical and Technology Officer later that year.

He has authored over 250 peer-reviewed articles, including several high-impact articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He served as Editor-in-Chief for 3 books on molecular diagnostics, and is listed an inventor on more than 20 issued or pending US patents.

Specialties: Technology evaluation, strategic planning, market trend assessment, product research and product development, discovery research, predicting the future, creative applications of technology in translational medicine