—Chris Clay joined blockchain game Gods Unchained following his departure as game director of Magic: The Gathering Arena in June. At the time, Clay said that he resigned from Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast — which owns MTG — for personal reasons.
Gods Unchained, owned by San Francisco-based Immutable, is an esport in which players can trade cards freely using the blockchain platform Ethereum.
“I believe blockchain represents a new frontier for game developers,” Clay said in a statement. “Digital asset ownership on the blockchain lets developers support games and their communities in ways we’ve never seen before in electronic gaming. A blockchain card doesn’t just sit in a database, it has the ability to travel the world and know where it’s been. Esports pros, streamers, and artists alike can digitally sign and sell digital items to fans. Blockchain isn’t just for digital currency; it is laying the foundation for a whole new digital economy.”
— The Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine (BBI) announced the establishment of its scientific advisory board, a group that includes:
-
- Dr. Richard Lifton, president of Rockefeller University;
- Dr. Nancy Cox, director of Vanderbilt Genetics Institute;
- Dr. Sekar Kathiresan, CEO of Verve Therapeutics;
- Dr. Geoffrey Ginsburg, director of the Duke Center for Applied Genomics & Precision Medicine;
- Dr. George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard University.
“We are incredibly excited to have the support of such a remarkable group,” Dr. Jay Shendure, scientific director of BBI, said in a statement. “With their guidance, and in coordination with our founding partners from UW Medicine, Seattle Children’s and Fred Hutch, we look forward to advancing the institute’s mission in genomics and precision medicine.”
BBI was formed in late 2017 with $50 million in funding from Costco co-founder Jeff Brotman. Researchers tied to the organization have since embarked on a city-wide flu study in Seattle and created a massive genetic map of organ development in mice, among other projects.
— Seattle-based health benefits company First Choice Health hired Dan Brown as chief technology officer. Brown was formerly vice president of enterprise solutions at ProKarma and was a director at Premera Blue Cross.
“First Choice Health is already using data and technology to develop flexible, 21st-century solutions for clients, and I’m looking forward to leading them further down this road while exploring, designing and delivering highly-scalable solutions that fit the healthcare plan management needs of employers, big or small,” Brown said in a statement.
