X PRIZE Foundation Announces Appointment of Bard J. Geesaman as Executive Director, Life Sciences

X Prize Foundation Press Release

Entrepreneur, Venture Capitalist, and Clinician/Scientist to Grow Prizes in the Area of Life Sciences

SANTA MONICA, Calif., January 17, 2008 –The X PRIZE Foundation, an educational nonprofit prize institute created to foster radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity, today announced the appointment of Bard J. Geesaman, M.D. Ph.D. as Executive Director, Life Sciences. Beyond his academic and medical qualifications, he is the founder of two healthcare companies and worked as a venture capitalist. He has extensive experience in business, clinical medicine, basic research, and finance.

As Executive Director, Geesaman will be responsible for developing, funding and running new prizes in the area of Life Sciences, which will include any cancer, healthcare and genomics prizes. The Foundation has a goal of launching 10-15 new prizes worth $300 million over the next seven years, several of which will be in the Life Sciences.

“Bard’s medical background and experience in the business sector position him perfectly to handle the technical, organizational and financial challenges of running our Life Sciences vertical,” said Tom Vander Ark, President of the X PRIZE Foundation. “Under Bard’s leadership, we hope to make Life Sciences one of the cornerstones of our prize portfolio.”

ABOUT BARD GEESAMAN
Dr. Geesaman joined the X PRIZE Foundation from MPM Capital, where he worked as a Venture Partner, assessing new investment opportunities and assisting in business development for existing portfolio companies. At MPM he founded JapanBridge, an oncology pharmaceutical company in Tokyo which focuses on expediting drug development in Asia. Prior to MPM, he served as the Vice President, Medical Development for Elixir Pharmaceuticals, where he oversaw clinical strategy for drug development and the human genetics program, as well being involved in the company’s business development team. Coincident with these activities, Dr. Geesaman was a General Partner at F2 Ventures, a UK-based venture capital fund, and he continues to serve on the board of directors for these investments. His first experience in business immediately followed his medical training; Dr. Geesaman founded and was Chief Technical Officer of Catalyst Medical Solutions, where he designed and coded an enterprise application to enhance hospital revenue and improve medical documentation and compliance.

Dr. Geesaman’s academic background ranges from the fields of computer engineering to computational biology to clinical medicine, and he has written for a number of publications in these fields. Dr. Geesaman became board certified in Internal Medicine in 2000, after completing a Clinical Fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He has a Ph.D. in Systems and Computational Neurobiology from MIT, an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and a B.S. from U.C. Berkeley in Systems Neurobiology.