Management Team
M. Scott Salka
Chief Executive Officer
Member, Ambit Board of Directors
Donald R. Myll
Chief Financial Officer
Senior Vice President, Commercial Operations
Shripad Bhagwat, Ph.D.
Senior Vice President, Drug Discovery
Stephen F. Keane
Vice President, Corporate Development
Patrick P. Zarrinkar, Ph.D.
Senior Director, Technology Development & Alliance Management
Hitesh K. Patel, Ph.D.
Director of Discovery Chemistry
M. Scott Salka
Chief Executive Officer
Member, Ambit Board of DirectorsM. Scott Salka brings to Ambit expertise earned at the helm of several genomics companies. Prior to joining Ambit in 2001, he served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of two privately-held genomics companies, Arcaris, Inc. and 454 Corporation. He also previously co-founded one of the first commercial genomics companies, Sequana Therapeutics, Inc., a pioneer in the effort to commercialize the international Human Genome Project. As Sequana’s Vice President of Operations and Chief Financial Officer, Salka played key roles in financing the company through private and public stock offerings and in establishing research alliances with GlaxoSmithKline, Boehringer Mannheim, Boehringer Ingelheim and Parke-Davis. Salka has also held various management positions at Burroughs Corporation, Unisys Corporation and The BFGoodrich Company. He served honorably in the United States Army’s Special Forces as an advisor to several Central American governments on matters of internal defense. Salka received his M.B.A. from Carnegie Mellon University and his B.S. in finance from San Diego State University.
Donald R. Myll
Chief Financial Officer
Senior Vice President, Commercial OperationsDonald R. Myll brings more than 25 years of accounting and financial management experience to Ambit. He previously served as Chief Financial Officer of AMN Healthcare, where he led the company in its initial public offering, secondary offering, and other successful financing transactions. He has held senior positions at healthcare information technology company Daou Systems, where he worked as a member of a specialized turn-around management team, and venture capital-backed audiology services company Hearing Science, where he served as CEO and Director. Prior to joining Hearing Science, Myll served as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of TheraTx, where he led the company’s successful initial public offering and subsequent public debt financings, negotiated several M&A; transactions, and spearheaded the negotiation and sale of the company. Myll has also served in a senior financial capacity for Advanced Marketing Services, Inc. and Mercy Services Corporation. Myll is a certified public accountant and received his B.A. in business economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Shripad Bhagwat, Ph.D.
Senior Vice President, Drug DiscoveryShripad Bhagwat’s more than 20 years of research experience in the pharmaceutical industry are driving Ambit’s internal drug discovery efforts. Prior to joining Ambit, he served as Vice President of Drug Discovery at Signal Pharmaceuticals (now Celgene), where he was responsible for managing screening, medicinal chemistry, structure based drug design, PK/ADME and in vivo pharmacology. He also supervised multiple drug discovery projects in cancer and inflammation with a focus on kinases and helped identify six drug candidates, two of which are currently in phase 2 clinical trials. Bhagwat previously served as Senior Group Leader, Neuroscience Research at Abbott Laboratories, where he managed medicinal chemistry, combinatorial chemistry and structure based drug design activities. He also contributed to the drug discovery research at Ciba-Geigy Corporation, where his work led to the identification of three candidates for clinical development. Bhagwat has published over 50 papers and is an inventor on over 40 issued patents or pending patent applications. He received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and conducted postdoctoral research at Columbia University.
Stephen F. Keane
Vice President, Corporate DevelopmentStephen F. Keane brings to Ambit more than 20 years of experience in the biotechnology industry, during which he has negotiated numerous strategic corporate alliances, established joint ventures and assisted in public and private financings to support product development. Prior to joining Ambit, Keane held senior corporate development positions with Dendreon Corporation, Corvas International, Epimmune Inc., SIBIA Neurosciences, Inc. and Molecular Biosystems, Inc. In these positions, he was responsible for negotiating significant alliances including licenses, distributions agreements, technology acquisitions and research agreements with large pharmaceutical companies and government agencies. He served as the principal negotiator for the acquisition of Corvas by Dendreon and SIBIA by Merck & Co. Keane received a B.A. from San Diego State University.
Patrick P. Zarrinkar, Ph.D.
Senior Director, Technology Development & Alliance ManagementPatrick P. Zarrinkar brings a deep understanding of genomics and high throughput screening to Ambit. Prior to joining Ambit in 2000, he was a Staff Scientist at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) in San Diego, where he worked in collaboration with Affymetrix, Inc. to develop high throughput methods for global gene expression profiling. Zarrinkar received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and conducted postdoctoral research in the lab of Professor Bruce Sullenger at Duke University Medical Center. He received a B.S. in chemistry from the University of South Carolina.
Hitesh Patel, Ph.D.
Director of Discovery Chemistry
Hitesh K. Patel contributes expertise in chemistry and drug discovery to the Ambit team. Prior to joining Ambit in 2001, he served as a team leader at Pharmacopeia Inc., where he managed a group of scientists involved in the generation of combinatorial libraries for optimization and drug discovery programs. At Pharmacopeia, Patel was awarded several patents, published multiple scientific papers, and led his team in securing a grant for $1M to continue his work on protease inhibitors. Patel received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Southampton, U.K., and completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Professor W. Clark Still at Columbia University. He received his B.Sc. (Hons.) in chemistry from the University of Wales, U.K.