Dr. Charles Cantor

Dr. Charles Cantor is a founder, and retired Chief Scientific Officer at SEQUENOM, Inc., which is a genetics discovery company with tools, information and strategies for determining the medical impact of genes and genetic variations. Dr. Cantor consults for a number of biotech companies including SEQUENOM, Agena and Retrotope.

He is also the founder of SelectX Pharmaceuticals, a drug discovery company, Retrotope, an anti-aging company, and DiThera, a biotherapeutic company.
Dr. Cantor is professor emeritus of Biomedical Engineering and of Pharmacology and was the director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology at Boston University. He is currently adjunct professor of Bioengineering at UC San Diego, adjunct professor of Molecular Biology at the Scripps Institute for Research, distinguished adjunct professor of Physiology and Biophysics at UC Irvine and adjunct professor at the Moscow institute of Physics and Technology. Prior to this, Dr. Cantor held positions in Chemistry and then in Genetics and Development at Columbia University and in Molecular Biology at the University of California at Berkeley. Cantor was educated in chemistry at Columbia College (AB) and at the University of California Berkeley (PhD).

Dr. Cantor has been granted more than 60 US patents and, with Paul Schimmel, wrote a three-volume textbook on biophysical chemistry. He also co-authored the first textbook on Genomics titled ‘The Science and Technology of the Human Genome Project’. In addition, he has published more than 450 peer-reviewed articles, and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. His major scientific accomplishments include the development of pulsed field electrophoresis, immuno PCR, affinity capture electrophoresis, the earliest uses of FRET to characterize distances in protein complexes and nucleic acids, the standard methods for assaying and purifying microtubule protein, various applications of nucleic acid mass spectrometry, and methods for noninvasive prenatal diagnostics. He is also considered to be one of the founders of the new field of synthetic biology.