Scannon, ’76, named distinguished alumnus at UGA

Dr. Patrick Scannon, a 1976 graduate, has received the Distinguished Alumnus Award for the Chemistry Department at the University of Georgia. Scannon earned a BS in chemistry in 1969, After completing ROTC at UGA, he entered officer basic training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and became a 2nd lieutenant in the US Army. Placed on inactive reserves, he immediately headed to UC-Berkeley and earned a PhD in organic chemistry in 1972.

After graduating from MCG, he completed his residency and board certification in internal medicine in 1979 while on active duty at Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco. He spent two years at the Letterman Army Institute of Research, developing chemical cross-linking technologies for stabilizing human hemoglobin, as a potential artificial blood substitute.

Becoming interested in the then new area of therapeutic applications of monoclonal antibody technologies, Dr. Scannon founded XOMA Corporation (http://www.xoma.com) in 1981, participated in taking the company public in 1986 and served for 35 years as its chief scientist and a member of XOMA’s board of directors, retiring in 2016. XOMA’s laboratories have developed and patented numerous antibody products and methodologies which have been licensed or acquired by major pharmaceutical companies and incorporated into several FDA approved products. He is the inventor or co-inventor of multiple issued U.S. and ex-US patents, and has published numerous scientific abstracts and papers. He is currently assisting a number of scientists interested in start-up companies in biotechnology and material sciences.

In addition, Dr. Scannon was elected to and served on the Defense Sciences Research Council (1998-2013) for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), concentrating on rapid national responsiveness to attacks of bioterrorism. Continuing his volunteer interest in bioresponsiveness, he then received an appointment from President G. W. Bush to serve on Department of Defense’s Threat Reduction Advisory Board (2001-2009) and an appointment from Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to serve on the National Biodefense Research Council (2007-2013). Dr. Scannon also served as a member of the Research Committee for Infectious Diseases Society of America (2009-2012).

Dr. Scannon is currently President and Founder of The BentProp Project (a 501c3 not-for-profit organization, http://www.bentprop.org), searching since 1993 for American military Missing in Action and Prisoners of War primarily from WWII. He has assembled a volunteer team, who share his passion and mission, with relevant expertise for land and water searches and documentation. In 2016 after receiving a generous private donation, he helped create Project Recover (http://www.projectrecover.org) with members from Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Eric Terrill, PhD) and University of Delaware (Mark Moline, PhD) which has now expanded their MIA and POW searches globally. Before the formation of Project Recover, numerous articles had appeared about BentProp’s activities, including a 60 Minutes piece with Anderson Cooper, “A Forgotten Corner of Hell”, as well as a book “Vanished” (Penguin Random House) written by New York Times journalist, Wil Hylton.

Read more about Dr. Scannon here.