Jackson Lab Appoints Lon Cardon as President and CEO

Rare Daily Staff

The Jackson Laboratory, an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution, today announced the appointment of BioMarin Senior Vice President and Chief Scientific Strategy Officer Lon Cardon, as its new president and CEO effective November 29.

Photo: Lon Cardon, who was named as the new president and CEO of The Jackson Laboratory

Cardon will succeed current president and CEO Edison Liu, who will step down after a decade of leadership. Liu will continue to serve as a JAX professor studying the functional genomics of cancer with a focus on breast cancer.

“As both an accomplished academic researcher as well as a demonstrated successful leader in both pharma and biotech, Lon is extremely well-suited to shape the vision, impact and strategic direction of The Jackson Laboratory over the next decade,” said Timothy Dattels, vice chairman of The Jackson Laboratory Board of Trustees and chair of the Presidential Search Committee said.

The Jackson Laboratory, headquartered in Bar Harbor, Maine, is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution with more than 2,400 employees. Its mission is to discover precise genomic solutions for disease and empower the global biomedical community in the shared quest to improve human health.

In his new role, Cardon will develop and drive a clear, integrated strategy for the Laboratory’s continued long-term success, leveraging the unique and powerful interplay of JAX’s deep expertise in mammalian genetics and human genomics combined with the latest advances in digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and new computation platforms as well as its research, educational and business strengths.

“For many years there has been immense promise to translate human genetics and genomics discoveries into new diagnostics, prognostics and treatments for both common and rare diseases,” said Cardon. “Many of the foundational pieces are finally coming into place. The next step is to put them together to begin to realize this promise.”

Cardon joined BioMarin in September 2017 as chief scientific officer and senior vice president and was promoted in 2019 to chief scientific strategy officer to enrich BioMarin’s pipeline. Before joining BioMarin, he was a senior vice president at GlaxoSmithKline, leading departments and divisions spanning genetics, molecular biology, computational biology, statistics and epidemiology, and ultimately leading an early-to-late pipeline division called Alternative Discovery and Development. Prior to Cardon’s 14-year tenure in industry, he spent the first half of his career as a senior academic in the United Kingdom and United States, initially as professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Oxford and then as professor of Biostatistics at the University of Washington and co-chair of the Herbold Bioinformatics Program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Cardon received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado and conducted his postdoctoral research in the Department of Mathematics at Stanford University. He has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Principal Fellowship and is an elected Fellow of the U.K.’s Academy of Medical Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.