Printable Biography of Christian Behrenbruch

Dr. Behrenbruch is a Professor in the Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging (Department of Medical and Molecular Pharmacology, David Geffen School of Medicine). His appointment as an "Entrepreneur in Residence" at UCLA follows a successful track-record in commercializing biotechnology, healthcare IT and medical devices. His laboratory focuses on the technical and clinical challenges of introducing new device, instrumentation and nanotechnology solutions into the healthcare practice. He also teaches in the area of life science commercialization and technology transfer. Dr. Behrenbruch is also a visiting academic at the Zhejiang-California Nanosystems Institute, Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China and has taught entrepreneurship classes at UCLA, Oxford University, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), ESMT (Berlin), ZJU (China). He is currently a UC Discovery Mentor (University of California's entrepreneurship program).

Dr. Behrenbruch runs a small research group (research assistants/Postdocs) and several collaborations with other members of the Crump Institute. He has three focus areas :

1) Development of MEMS-based devices to accelerate antibody engineering. The Crump (through Dr. Anna Wu's lab) has a focus area in antibody engineering for diagnostic imaging. This research is focused on building devices to perform rapid expression, purification and binding assays to improve the speed of reformatting antibodies into fragments suitable for imaging with PET and nuclear medicine.

2) Quantitative Molecular Imaging. Through a collaboration with Dr. Henry Huang and Dr. Christine Wu, we look at ways of performing in vitro and in vivo measurements of pharmacokinetics in order to quantify biological phenomena.

3) The "PETable Genome". In partnership with Dr. Caius Radu's lab, we take a bioinformatics strategy to determining what makes a good target for PET imaging and potentially the overlap with important emerging therapeutics areas like metabolomics.

Dr. Behrenbruch received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Monash University, Australia and received a Ph.D from Oxford University under Sir Prof. Mike Brady in the field of tumor imaging for breast cancer. He also took additional graduate study in computational biology and genomics at Stanford University. He holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) jointly issued from New York University and the London School of Economics and has a strong background in corporate finance and negotiation. Dr. Behrenbruch holds over 40 publications and patents in the domain of cancer imaging and medical informatics. A serial entrepreneur with a diverse background, Dr. Behrenbruch started his career with BHP Asia (Vietnam) in the oil and gas industry and Siemens Telecommunications. In the late 90s, he was involved in starting several UK-based companies including Oxford Medical Image Analysis and Mirada Solutions. In 2003 during his term as CEO, Mirada Solutions was sold to CTI Molecular Imaging (Nasdaq: CTMI) and he became President of the IT and bioinformatics division of CTI. In 2005, CTI became part of Siemens Medical Solutions in a $1B acquisition and Dr. Behrenbruch was a Vice President at Siemens during the 18 month post-merger integration.