Linguagen Corp. announced the formation of its scientific advisory board (SAB).

The board initially consists of four scientists and industry participants in the fields of taste transduction and pharmaceutical discovery. Linguagen's SAB includes Robert Margolskee, M.D., Ph.D.; David Floyd, Ph.D.; Sue Kinnamon, Ph.D.; and Stephen Roper, Ph.D..

Margolskee, the founder of Linguagen Corp., will chair the SAB. He is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor of neuroscience and pharmacology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. His research has been in the application of molecular biology and transgenic animal models to the study of taste transduction.

Margolskee has made numerous discoveries in the taste field, including the identification and molecular cloning of taste specific receptors, G proteins, channels and other taste signal transduction elements. He received his BA in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University, his M.D. and Ph.D. in molecular genetics from Johns Hopkins, and completed his post-doctoral studies at Stanford University.

Floyd is the executive vice president and chief scientific officer of the newly formed Pharmacopeia Drug Discovery. Prior to joining Pharmacopeia, he was vice president of discovery chemistry at Bristol-Myers Squibb, where he was responsible for a multi-site organization that produced more than 80 drug candidates in the areas of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, neuroscience, infectious disease, oncology and inflammation. Trained as an organic chemist, he received his doctorate from the University of Michigan followed by an U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.

Kinnamon is a professor in the department of Biomedical Sciences at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on mechanisms of taste transduction, utilizing patch clamp electrophysiology and calcium imaging of single taste cells. She has published several reviews and book chapters about mechanisms of taste transduction and presented at many international and national conferences, including the Society for Neuroscience, where she spoke on the recent advances in taste transduction. In 2001, she was awarded the Association for Chemoreception Sciences Award for Outstanding Achievement. She obtained her doctorate from Kansas State and completed her postdoctoral training in the departments of Physiology and Cell and Structural Biology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

Roper is a professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Miami School of Medicine. His research focuses on the cellular and molecular biology of chemosensory transduction in taste buds, and he has published numerous articles on this topic. He was president of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences and is currently the president for the Society for Neuroscience (Miami Chapter). Prior to his position at the University of Miami, Roper was a professor in the department of anatomy and neurobiology, and physiology at Colorado State University. A Fullbright Fellow, Roper received his BA in biology from Harvard, his Ph.D. in physiology from the University of London, and completed his post-doctoral studies at Harvard Medical School.