Malek Faham, M.D., Ph.D.

Malek is an inventor and an entrepreneur. He was previously the co-founder and chief scientific officer of Sequenta, a company founded in 2008 to discover and develop diagnostic tests based on immune cell receptor repertoire sequencing. Sequenta developed and validated sensitive DNA-sequencing based minimal residual disease testing for leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma, and it was acquired by Adaptive Biotechnologies in 2015.

Malek also co-founded ParAllele Biosciences in 2001 and served as its director of Research. ParAllele’s polymorphism detection and genotyping technologies were adopted by many pharmaceutical and academic partners, including the HapMap project. The company was acquired by Affymetrix for $120M in 2005, and Malek transitioned into vice president of Research and Oncology Technology where he remained until 2008. During that time, he spearheaded the development of multiple genomic technologies that combined different methods for specific highly multiplexed amplifications with array readouts. These were applied to analysis of copy number from formalin fixed samples, high resolution promoter methylation, and high throughput high accuracy array resequencing.

Malek obtained a PhD in Human Genetics and an MD (board eligible in Psychiatry) from the University of California, San Francisco. He has published 60 peer reviewed articles and is an inventor on 40 US issued patents.