Mickey Urdea

Dr. Urdea is Founder and Partner for Halteres Associates. He also founded and served as Chief Executive Officer of Tethys Bioscience, a proteomics-based diagnostics company that has been involved in the prevention of type-2 diabetes (assets acquired by HDL), and was CEO of Quantum Dots Corporation (assets acquired by Life Technologies).

Additionally, Dr. Urdea is a founder and the Chairman of Catalysis Foundation for Health (CFH), a non-profit organization addressing gaps in global healthcare caused by inefficiencies in disease diagnosis and monitoring; CFH is developing potential biomarkers for tuberculosis bacterial load with a grant for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dr. Urdea is a member of the University of California at San Francisco Leadership Council for Global Health. He serves as a consultant to the life sciences industry and is on the scientific advisory boards and boards of directors of a number of biotechnology and diagnostics companies.

Prior to his current activities, Dr. Urdea founded the Nucleic Acid Diagnostics business at Chiron Corporation, where he pioneered viral load assays for the human hepatitis B, hepatitis C and immunodeficiency viruses; his team introduced the first commercial viral load assays for all three viruses. Dr. Urdea also headed the Oncology Diagnostics business unit at Chiron. He then became business head of the Molecular Diagnostics group and Chief Scientific Officer at Bayer Diagnostics. He has served as an advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for over ten years. Dr. Urdea is an author on over 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications and has more than 125 issued and pending patents.

He received his BS in Biology and Chemistry from Northern Arizona University, his PhD in Biochemistry from Washington State University, and had an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at San Francisco.