Management Team

Connie J. Kohne

President, Chief Executive Officer

Ms. Connie Kohne is the President, CEO and co-founder of Jaden BioScience Inc. (Jaden). Prior to founding Jaden, Ms. Kohne was the Vice President of Regulatory Affairs and Quality at Telos Pharmaceuticals Inc., a biotechnology company developing immunomodulatory biopharmaceutical products such as monoclonal antibodies and other proteins for the treatment or prevention of a variety of human diseases. Ms. Kohne is a regulatory affairs and quality assurance professional for the medical health industry with over twenty-five years of broad-based experience in the pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and medical device industries.

Ms. Kohne received her Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry and biology from the University of Oregon in 1984. From 1981 to 1984, Ms. Kohne served in public office as a City Councilwoman and then Mayor of Lowell, Oregon. After 1984, she worked at Scripps Research Clinic, La Jolla, CA, as a peptide chemist and then for Gen-Probe Inc. San Diego, CA as a quality assurance, quality control, clinical and regulatory affairs professional, where she obtained multiple 510K approvals from the FDA for novel nucleic acid in vitro medical diagnostic devices for infectious diseases. Ms. Kohne worked in the area of gene therapy from 1994 to 1996 as the Director of Regulatory Affairs at Canji Inc. (subsequently a subsidiary of Schering-Plough Corporation), working on cancer applications using an adenoviral P53 gene construct and other gene constructs. From 1996 through 1999, Ms. Kohne worked at Agouron Pharmaceuticals Inc., later acquired by Pfizer, as the Director of Regulatory Affairs, Head of Virology in the US, Advertising and Promotion Regulatory Affairs. During her tenure at Agouron, she held regulatory responsibility for a variety of small molecule antiviral drugs in all phases of clinical development and was a key member of the team that submitted and obtained approval for Viracept (nelfinavir mesylate), an HIV protease inhibitor for both adults and children. Ms. Kohne worked at Gen-Star Corporation, as the Vice President of Regulatory Affairs and Corporate Quality, working with various gene constructs including a minimized adenoviral vector containing the full length Factor VIII gene for application in the treatment of hemophilia A.

Ms. Kohne's work with the FDA in the grassroots initiative was recognized by the Vice President of the United States and was awarded the administration's 1997 Hammer Award for outstanding leadership in furthering the FDA's goals for public health. Subsequently in 1998, she was recognized by the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and was awarded the Commissioner's Special Citation in 1998 for outstanding leadership and furthering the FDA's public health goals.

David E. Kohne, Ph.D.

Chief Scientific Officer, Research and Development

David Kohne, Ph.D. is the Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Jaden BioScience Inc.'s (Jaden). Dr. Kohne is a world-renown expert in nucleic acid and molecular diagnostic assay development. He began his lifelong work with nucleic acids while attending Purdue University, where he graduated in 1965 with a Ph.D. in Molecular Embryology. His post-doctoral work was completed at Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism's Biophysics Department, where staff members, comprised of physicists, were studying various aspects of biological organisms and molecules. Nucleic acids were the main research focus of the group.

After a year Dr. Kohne was hired as a Biophysics Department staff member. While at Carnegie, Dr. Kohne developed a variety of widely used methods for RNA and DNA nucleic acid analysis and characterization. These included methods for isolating genes, detecting and studying gene expression, detecting the presence of viruses in cells, and studying various aspects of biological DNA evolution. Dr. Kohne's work was widely recognized. His work in gene isolation was featured in the New York Times. He and his co-workers' work on the repeated and non-repeated DNA composition of eukaryotes was discussed in Time Magazine. As a result of his work in the late 1960s, Dr. Kohne was recognized as a world expert in nucleic acid analysis and nucleic acid hybridization. Dr. Kohne's work on detecting the presence of viruses in mammalian cells began a long-term interest in the role of infectious agents in human disease. Dr. Kohne believed that nucleic acid hybridization methods would be very effective for studying and analyzing many important aspects of human disease. In the 1970s, he began working on rationales and methods for applying his nucleic acid expertise to human disease diagnostics. His research lead to the founding of Gen-Probe in 1983.

At Gen-Probe, Dr. Kohne continued using his methods to characterize the functional quality of chemically synthesized oligomers which were an integral part of Gen-Probe's products. While at Gen-Probe he developed multiple highly successful commercial nucleic acid molecular diagnostic assays including multiple different chemiluminescence based products for a wide variety of medically important analytes. His design of the PACE II Chlamydia and Gonorrhea assays earned the UCSD Innovative Design Award.

After leaving Gen-Probe, Dr. Kohne concentrated on developing general purpose signal generation and detection systems and assay platforms which could be incorporated into existing sandwich assay formats and used for the quantitative and qualitative ultrasensitive detection of nucleic acid and protein analytes. To accomplish this Dr. Kohne developed effective rationales, designs, methods, and strategies for developing, quality controlling, and manufacturing, quantitative and qualitative ultrasensitive chemiluminescent signal generation and detection systems and assays. He was successful in developing several such powerful systems. Dr. Kohne's continued work led to the development of novel rationales and methods for determining and quantitating the functional homogeneity and functional characteristics of chemically and enzymatically synthesized nucleic acid oligomers of all kinds. This work has important implications for RNA and DNA oligo applications of all kinds. Dr. Kohne's long-term interest in the use of nucleic acid hybridization for studying and quantitating gene expression, has led to the development of numerous strategies, methods, rationales and approaches for greatly improving the biological accuracy of current quantitative gene expression analysis, which must be utilized in order to produce differential gene expression results which can be known to be biologically and medically accurate.