Dr. Charles Cantor is co-founder, and retired Chief Scientific Officer at SEQUENOM, Inc., the leading provider of noninvasive prenatal testing. He consults for a number of biotech companies including Simcere/Bioscikin (China), Star-Array (Singapore), Edico Genomics (USA), Innovative Biosciences (China), Agena Biosciences (USA), Strand Life Sciences (India), Trovagene (USA), Ana Jema (China), ProdermIQ (USA), Armonica (USA), Anchor DX (China), My Genome Box, a subsidiary of EOne (Korea), Genetic Intelligence (USA) and In Silico Biology (Russia, USA), and he is co-founder and executive director of Retrotope (USA), a clinical stage pharmaceutical company.
In the past decade, Charles has focused his attention on developing rational and cost-effective approaches to preventive and personalized medicine. is includes (1) liquid biopsies (Agena Biosciences, Trovagene, Innovative Biociences, Anchor DX) that could detect age-related disease pathology earlier and thus allow for more effective intervention, (2) DNA testing in minutes suitable for use in emergency rooms and operating theaters (Star-Array) and (3) deuterated lipids (Retrotope) that show great promise at reducing the oxidative damage processes that play a central role in many age-related diseases.
Charles has held academic and leadership positions at Columbia and several other distinguished American universities, but for the past 20 years he has focused his efforts in biotechnology companies. Charles is currently professor emeritus of Biomedical Engineering and of Pharmacology at Boston University. He is 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.
Charles received his bachelor’s of art in chemistry at Columbia College and his doctorate from UC Berkeley. He became a full professor of chemistry at Columbia University at the age of 29.
