Malek Faham, MD, PhD

Chief Scientist

Dr. Faham is an inventor and an entrepreneur. He was previously the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Sequenta Inc, a company founded in 2008 focused on discovering and developing 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. Dr. Faham has previously co-founded ParAllele Biosciences in 2001 and served as its Director of Research. ParAllele's technologies were adopted by many customers and used for polymorphism detection and genotyping by multiple pharmaceutical and academic partners, including the HapMap project. The company was acquired by Affymetrix for $120M in 2005, and Dr. Faham transitioned into VP Research, 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. Dr. Faham obtained a Ph.D. 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.