Dr. Robert Penny is Founder and CEO of Paradigm, a cutting-edge advanced diagnostics company that will help usher in the age of personalized medicine. Dr. Penny drove the vision and launch of the company, along with Dr. Jay Hess to provide improved cancer treatments based on an individual’s cancer’s unique biology. This is his sixth start up company; the previous five are all successful in the practice of medicine and financially.
Dr. Penny is also the Co-founder and CEO of the International Genomics Consortium (IGC) in Phoenix, Arizona. He created and drove the success of IGC’s national Expression Project for Oncology (expO). Dr. Penny was awarded the Principal Investigator for the Biospecimen Core Resource (BCR) for the founding Pilot Project and the full project for The Cancer Genome Atlas Project (TCGA) and a separate award for TCGA’s founding Tissue Source Site network. He helped create the vision of TCGA through his expO work and helped lead the practice of Oncology to utilize molecular pathways and the drugs that work on those pathways.
While at the IGC, he envisioned and founded the Molecular Profiling Institute and served as its CEO and Chairman of the Board. The Molecular Profiling Institute is the first company to commercially introduce gene expression analysis into oncology in the U.S. He developed the successful commercially available test Target Now.
The College of American Pathologists awarded Dr. Penny the national organization’s 2012 Distinguished Patient Care Award for his extensive scientific translational research to accelerate the adoption of molecular pathways and associated therapies. In 2011, the AZ BioIndustry Association honored Dr. Penny with the Jon W. McGarity Leadership Award for his vision in advancing cancer personalized medicine and success in leading the industry.
Dr. Penny received his B.S., M.S., Ph.D. (Genetics) and M.D. from the University of Arizona and then went on to receive his pathology training at Harvard’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.