Management Team

Fred Volinsky, MD
Founder and CEO

Fred Volinsky began his career as an Emergency Physician where he spent 8 years on the attending staff of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He was one of the original faculty members of the Harvard Residency in Emergency Medicine and the Harvard Department of Emergency Medicine at MGH.

While at Harvard, Volinsky developed a medical device that he licensed to Moser Medical. Dr. Volinsky continued to follow his entrepreneurial interests and co-founded Exhale Pharmaceuticals, now known as CoTherix (CTRX-Nasdaq). He left MGH in 2000 to become Managing Director of RCT BioVentures, an early stage life science fund where he was an investor in a variety of biotechnology companies including Cylene Pharmaceuticals, Catalyst BioSciences, Kerberos Proximal Solutions, Imagine Pharmaceuticals, and Arizeke Pharmaceuticals. He has held Directorships at Myometrix, Cylene Pharmaceuticals, Imagine Pharmaceuticals, Kerberos Proximal Solutions, and Catalyst Biosciences.

Dr. Volinsky is a Co-Chairman of the Stanford BioBootcamp and the founder and Co-Chairman of the UCSD BioBootcamp. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the UCSD Cancer Center, the Scientific Advisory Board to the Bailard Life Science Fund, and the Clinical Advisory Board of Catalyst Biosciences. Volinsky is also a consultant to Threshold Pharmaceuticals and Diobex. Dr. Volinsky earned his medical degree at Eastern Virginia Medical School. He completed a residency in Emergency Medicine at Madigan Army Medical center and was elected as a Fellow to the American College of Emergency Physicians. Volinsky spent 6 years as a military physician and was an attending physician at Walter Reed Army Center.

Robert C. Gallo, MD
Co-founder and SAB Chairman

Robert Gallo is currently the Director of the Institute of Human Virology and Division of Basic Science at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. Prior to becoming director of the Institute in 1996, Dr. Gallo spent 30 years at the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute (NCI), where he was head of its Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology.

During his time at the NCI, Dr. Gallo and his team were not only co-discoverers of HIV but pioneered the development of the HIV blood test. The AIDS virus blood screen now allows more rapid diagnosis of infection while simultaneously protecting patients receiving blood transfusions. In 1996, Dr. Gallo and his team his discovered that a natural compound known as chemokines can block the HIV virus and halt the progression of AIDS.

Prior to the AIDS epidemic, Dr. Gallo and his team identified the human leukemia retrovirus HTLV, one of few known viruses shown to cause a human cancer.

Dr. Gallo is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He holds 19 honorary doctorates and has been awarded the Albert Lasker Award in Medicine twice (1982 and 1986). Dr. Gallo was the most referenced scientist in the world in the 1980s and 1990s, and is the author of more than 1,100 scientific publications and the book “Virus Hunting - AIDS, Cancer & the Human Retrovirus: A Story of Scientific Discovery.”

Brian Murphy, MD, MPH, MBA
Chief Medical Officer

Brian Murphy was most recently Chief Medical Officer at Valeant Pharmaceuticals International where he oversaw development portfolios in neurology and hepatology, including the taribavirin, Pradefovir and Infergen programs. Prior to joining Valeant, Dr. Murphy held a number of management posts at InterMune, Inc., including Vice President of Hepatology Marketing, and served as Medical Director of North America for Hoffmann-LaRoche working on the development of Pegasys for the treatment of chronic hepatitis C.

Dr. Murphy earned his medical degree, master of science in pharmacology, and master of public health degrees from New York Medical College and went on to complete his master of public health in health care policy and management at Harvard University. Dr. Murphy is board-certified in internal medicine, having completed his residency and chief residency in internal medicine at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston. He went on to complete fellowships in Clinical Medicine & Epidemiology at Massachusetts General Hospital-Harvard Medical School and in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School where his research interests focused on issues of distributive justice in health care. Dr. Murphy’s clinical practice was focused on the treatment of HIV and HCV and examining clinical outcomes and therapies for those diseases. While serving as Director of Clinical Strategies for the Catholic Healthcare Network of New York, Dr. Murphy earned his MBA from Columbia University. He serves as a reviewer for a variety of professional publications, including the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Michael Houghton, PhD
Chief Scientific Officer

Michael Houghton joined Epiphany following a distinguished 24 year career at Chiron where he was most recently Vice President of HCV and Virology Research.  In 1989, Dr. Houghton and his Chiron colleagues were the first to identify the hepatitis C virus (HCV) in collaboration with the CDC. Their discovery led to a series of HCV tests that are now used globally to screen the blood supply to prevent infection. Their work also led to the identification of important new anti-HCV drug targets. For this work, Dr. Houghton received the Albert Lasker Prize in 2000 as well as numerous other awards from various countries and organizations throughout the world. More recently, Dr. Houghton has focused on vaccine approaches to hepatitis C, including strategies for immunotherapy of this viral disease.

In addition to HCV, Dr. Houghton’s group was the first to characterize the hepatitis D virus (delta virus). He has published over 200 articles in the fields of gene regulation, human beta interferon and hepatitis C and D viruses. He also holds numerous patents issued in the fields of recombinant human interferons, bacterial expression vectors, and hepatitis C and D viruses.

Dr. Houghton obtained his PhD in Biochemistry from Kings College, University of London, and worked in the Searle Research Laboratories in the United Kingdom prior to joining Chiron which was recently acquired by Novartis.

Harold E. “Barry” Selick, PhD
Co-founder

Barry Selick has been Chief Executive Officer of Threshold Pharmaceuticals (THLD on NASDAQ—the best performing biotech IPO of 2005) since June 2002. Concurrently, Dr. Selick has been a Venture Partner of Sofinnova Ventures, Inc., a venture capital firm in San Francisco. From January 1999 to April 2002, he was co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Camitro Corporation, a biotechnology company sold to ArQule in early 2000 for approximately $100M. From 1992 to 1999, he was at Affymax Research Institute, most recently as Vice President of Research, which was acquired during that time by Glaxo Wellcome as its drug discovery technology development center.

Prior to working at Affymax, he held scientific positions at Protein Design Labs, Inc. and Anergen, Inc. As a staff scientist at Protein Design Labs, he co-invented the technology underlying the creation of fully humanized antibody therapeutics and applied that to PDL's first product, which was developed and commercialized by Roche as Zenapax for treating kidney transplant rejection. Dr. Selick also serves on the boards of directors of DiObex, Inc., Catalyst Biosciences, Bionaut Pharmaceuticals and Threshold Pharmaceuticals.

Dr. Selick received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and was a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Fund Fellow and an American Cancer Society Senior Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco.