Michael D. Pierschbacher, Ph.D. has joined ALSP as President and Chief Executive Officer. Prior to this, Dr. Pierschbacher was Senior Vice President at Integra LifeSciences Corporation, a Princeton, New Jersey-based medical device company and was appointed Director of the corporate Research Center, located in San Diego, California in 1998.
Dr. Pierschbacher was a founder of Telios Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and served as Senior Vice President and Scientific Director from June 1987 until it was acquired by Integra in 1995.
He was the co-discoverer of the Arg-Gly-Asp cell binding peptide sequence and the family of integrin cell-surface receptors that recognize that sequence, the technology on which Telios was based.
Before joining Telios as a full-time employee in October 1988, he was a staff scientist at the La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation, now called The Burnham Institute for Medical Research, and remained on staff there in an adjunct capacity until the end of 1995.
He also served as an adjunct professor, Department of Pathology, at UCSD from 1992 until 1995 and is a member of the Industrial Affiliates program at the Institute for Biomedical Engineering at UCSD.
He received his post-doctoral training at The Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, the La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation and the University of Uppsala, Sweden. Dr. Pierschbacher received a B.S. in biology/chemistry in 1974, and in 1978, after completing his thesis work at the Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany, he received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
He is also a member of the Board of Directors for the Burn Institute in San Diego where he serves as Vice President of Programs and Chairman of the Research Grants Committee.
