Mark Schena (biochemist)

Mark Alden Schena is an American biochemist and president of a public life sciences health care company. Schena was born on May 21, 1963 in Buffalo, New York. He received his B.A. in biochemistry from Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. Schena received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, San Francisco in 1990. Schena studied as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University from 1990-1999.

During his studies at Berkeley, Dr. Schena showed that changes in citrate synthase expression cause changes in flux through the citric acid cycle.^[1] This work provided a clearer view of the importance of rate limiting steps in enzymatic pathways. As a graduate student at UCSF, Dr. Schena discovered the evolutionary conservation of cellular mechanisms across eukaryotic evolution by demonstrating the conservation of mammalian glucocorticoid receptor function in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.^[2] At Stanford, Dr. Schena pioneered a new field of science (microarray technology) as the first author on the Stanford team publication in Science demonstrating that complementary DNA molecules immobilized on glass could be used to measure gene expression in the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana.^[3] The modern microarray industry and solid-phase DNA sequencing industry have drawn heavily from the 95’ Science paper. More than 42,000 peer-reviewed microarray publications have appeared in the scientific literature ^[4] since 1995, and a total of 3.6 million microarray “hits” can be found in on-line search engines,^[5] highlighting the rapid proliferation of microarray technology.

Dr. Schena has presented more than 100 lectures to audiences worldwide.^[6] He has written four books on microarrays,^{[7][8][9][10]} the first textbook on the subject,^[11] and has been featured widely by journalists in interviews covered by the print media, radio and television.^[12] Dr. Schena has pioneered an extensive line of microarray products and services at Arrayit,^[13] and is the inventor of Variation Identification Platform (VIP) technology, which is capable of genotyping up to 80,000 patients in a single microarray test.^[14] Dr. Schena has taken an active role in healthcare reform by promoting the importance of technical innovation as a means of improving the quality and accessibility of healthcare and controlling its cost.^[15]

Dr. Schena is considered the foremost authority on micorarray technology. In 2001, Dr. Schena was featured on the award-winning Nova television documentary “Cracking the Code of Life”, a two-hour special hosted by ABC News Nightline correspondent Robert Krulwich (16). Dr. Schena first introduced microarrays as pre-symptomatic diagnostic tools on the 2001 Nova program. Dr. Schena holds the first and second positions on “The Microarray Family Tree”, a historiograph of 13 influential papers published in the microarray field, written by Dr. Eugene Garfield Ph.D, Editor-in-Chief of The Scientist magazine (17). The Scientist also credited Dr. Schena with creating the first array (18). Dr. Schena was proclaimed the “Father of Microarrays” in an article written by Lloyd Dunlap, contributing editor of Drug Discovery News in an account of Dr. Schena’s pioneering work to decipher Parkinson’s Disease (19). Mark and Rene Schena reside in Los Altos, California.

References

1. ^ Walsh, K., Schena, M., Flint, A.J., and D.E. Koshland. Compensatory regulation in metabolic pathways- responses to increases and decreases in citrate synthase levels. Biochemistry Society Symposia 54, 183-195, 1987.
2. ^ Schena, M. and K.R. Yamamoto. Mammalian glucocorticoid receptor derivatives enhance transcription in yeast. Science 241, 965-967, 1988.
3. ^ Schena, M., Shalon, D., Davis, R.W. and P.O. Brown. Quantitative monitoring of gene expression patterns with a complementary DNA microarray. Science 270, 467-470, 1995.
4. ^ (enter search term “microarray or microarrays or microarrayer or microarrayed or microarraying”
5. ^ [1]
6. ^ (see research presentations)
7. ^ (DNA Microarrays: A Practical Approach, first book on microarrays, edited by Mark Schena, Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, pp. 232, 1999.
8. ^ Microarray Biochip Technology. First concepts book on DNA microarrays, edited by Mark Schena, BioTechniques Book Division, Eaton Publishing, Natick, Massachusetts, USA, pp. 347, 2000.
9. ^ Protein Microarrays. First comprehensive book on protein-based microarrays and proteomics, edited by Mark Schena, Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc., Sudbury, Massachusetts, USA, pp. 469, 2004
10. ^ DNA Microarrays-Methods Express. First microarray methods book on the latest applications of DNA microarrays including whole human genome microarrays, edited by Mark Schena, Scion Publishing Ltd., Bloxham, U.K, pp. 350, 2007.)
11. ^ Schena, M. Microarray Analysis. First Textbook on Microarray Analysis, 1st Edition, J. Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ, pp. 648, 2003.
12. ^ (see media coverage).
13. ^ http://arrayit.com/ .
14. ^ http://arrayit.com/Microarray_Diagnostics/microarray_diagnostics.html .
15. ^ http://arrayit.com/Microarray_Investor/The_Wall_Street_Transcript/the_wall_street_transcript.html

16. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/genome/. 17. Eugene Garfield, The Microarray Family Tree: A historiograph of 13 influential papers. The Scientist, 17(16):29, 2003. 18. The First Array, The Scientist, 17(16):18, 2003. 19. Lloyd Dunlap, The “father of microarrays” attacks Parkinson’s, Drug Discovery News 5 (5):34, 2009.

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Name	Schena, Mark
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Date of birth	1963
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