Meet our team
Leadership
Michael P Weiner, Ph.D.
- Founder & CEO
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Michael P. Weiner, Ph.D. obtained his undergraduate and graduate training at Penn State Univ. (Microbiology) and Cornell Univ. (Genetics, with minors in both Biochemistry and Microbiology), respectively. His graduate research involved cloning DNA methylation enzymes from various Bacillus species. He was the first to clone and sequence M.BamHI. He did post-doc training in the Dept of Phys Chem at Cornell Univ., where he synthesized the genes for RNaseA and thrombin, and investigated the in vitro folding behavior of both of these proteins. A few of his major scientific accomplishments include inventing and commercializing; (i) Quikchange site-directed mutagenesis, (ii) 454 Next generation DNA sequencing and emulsion PCR, and (iii) bead-based genotyping. His additional inventions include: (i) digital PCR, (ii) biopanning using emulsions, (iii) emulsion-based DNA sequencing, and (iv) FAC sorting virus particles.
Dr. Weiner has spent 6 years at GlaxoSmithKline as Head of the Dept of Genomic Sciences, where he invented the use of barcoding Luminex beads for HT-genotyping, and methods for an automated HT-yeast two-hybrid screening assay. He has co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed articles, over 50 U.S. patent and patent applications, and has edited 3 books in his areas of expertise: (1) Cloning and expression vectors for gene function analysis (Eaton Publishing), (2) Gene cloning and expression technologies (BioTechniques Press), and (3) Genetic Variation: a lab manual (Cold Spring Harbor Lab Press).
Dr Weiner is a serial scientific entrepreneur, having either founded or been one of the first scientists at several biotechnology companies, including: RainDance Technologies, 454 Life Sciences, Affomix, AxioMx, GnuBio and Encodia. He has received the Connecticut Entrepreneur of the year (2016) and the Citetab Lifetime Achievement (2019) awards.
Troy Lionberger, Ph.D.
- Chief Business Officer
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Dr. Lionberger leads the commercial function at AbbraTech. Formally trained as a biologist and biophysicist, he began his biotech career at Berkeley Lights (now Bruker), where he was one of the early scientists and responsible for inventing a single cell antibody discovery technology on the high-throughput, micro-fluidic screening platform known as Beacon®. Following his role in R&D, Troy grew with the company and eventually oversaw the business development function and later served as General Manager of the Partnerships and Services business unit. During Troy’s tenure, the antibody discovery technology he helped commercialize became an industry-leading approach adopted by a large fraction of large pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Using the approach Troy pioneered, therapeutic antibodies capable of neutralizing the SARS-CoV-2 virus were discovered in March of 2020; this antibody therapy was later commercialized and proved vital during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic before vaccines were available.
Troy earned his PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Michigan, where his research focused on how gene expression was regulated by the mechanical state of DNA. He completed postdoctoral training with the Department of Biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he built high-precision, optical trapping microscopes to measure the real-time activity of single molecules of RNA polymerase; he used this technology to deduce the mechanisms by which RNA polymerase activity was enhanced or repressed by transcription factors.
Linda Stevens
- Executive Director
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Linda has over 20 years of Biotech experience. Her Biotech adventures began at CuraGen Corporation, then at Ion Torrent Systems, Inc. and most recently the various companies under 4Catalyzer Corporation. She was involved from the earliest of stages of startup to mergers and acquisitions.
Linda’s has a diverse background, drive, and motivation that are requirements in both startup and Biotech companies. She handles the operational aspects allowing the scientists to focus on the science, which is critical for the company to achieve success.
Dr. Xiaofeng Li, Ph.D., M.D.
- Director of Molecular Sciences & Therapeutic Antibodies
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Dr. Xiaofeng Li has extensive expertise in protein chemistry, structural biology, antibody discovery, and therapeutic antibody development. After completing five years of medical training as an M.D., Dr. Li pursued a Ph.D. in Biophysics at Tsinghua University, where her graduate research focused on the structural and functional analysis of docking domains in cell signaling pathways critical to neuronal development using X-ray crystallography. Following her Ph.D., Dr. Li joined Yale University, where she completed postdoctoral training and later served as research faculty. Her research centered on the structural and functional analysis of clinically relevant proteins associated with Cerebral Cavernous Malformations (CCM), a vascular brain disorder linked to stroke and mortality. She was awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship from the American Heart Association (AHA) to conduct structural studies of CCM proteins and uncover the disease’s etiology.
Dr. Li’s industry experience includes key roles on the Global Research team at Abcam Plc., where she worked on developing therapeutic antibodies targeting SARS-CoV-2 using innovative three-dimensional site-specific antibodies and functional antibodies against GPCRs with the novel Directed-Ligand-Binding (DLB) technology. Currently, at Abbratech, Dr. Li leverages her deep expertise in phage display technology, structure-guided antigen design, and advanced antibody development technologies to drive transformative therapeutic innovations in infectious diseases, immuno-oncology, and GPCRs. She also pioneered the Epivolve technology for site-directed antibody discovery and development. Her work has been awarded NIH SBIR Phase I and Phase II grants. With a passion for innovation and collaboration, Dr. Li continues to advance Abbratech’s mission to deliver next-generation antibody-based therapies for a wide range of diseases.
Board of Directors
Michael P Weiner, Ph.D.
- Founder & CEO
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Michael Egholm, Ph.D.
- Board of Directors Member
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Michael Egholm, Ph.D., brings more than 27 years of proven leadership in developing and commercializing innovative technologies. Most recently Dr. Egholm serves as Chief Executive Officer and President of Standard BioTools.
Dr. Egholm, served as Chief Technology Officer at Danaher Life Sciences a platform of Danaher Corporation. He served as President of Biopharmaceuticals and the Chief Technology Officer, at Pall Corporation. He served as Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Research & Development at 454 Life Sciences Corporation, a center of excellence at Roche Applied Science. At Roche, he spearheaded several large high-profile programs including the Neanderthal Sequencing project and the sequencing of the first individual human genome.
Sean Mackay
- Board of Directors Member
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Sean Mackay co-founded and leads IsoPlexis as CEO. IsoPlexis’ mission is to provide widely accessible cellular proteomics to speed personalized, curative medicines. The company focuses on shifting paradigms in cell and gene therapy, cancer immunology, and infectious disease towards more patient specific, long lasting treatments. IsoPlexis’ easy to use instrumentation and software have won numerous awards and are used globally to advance precision medicine.
Previously, Sean helped incubate Kleiner Perkins-backed Lifesquare, which connected patients, payers, and providers through sharing essential healthcare information. Additionally, through work at Lazard and with several early-stage ventures, he developed a passion for helping life sciences and medical device companies manage in times of strategic change, to deliver their highly needed products to the clinical ecosystem. Sean has co-authored a number of publications centered around immune medicines and holds patents for a number of single-cell products worldwide.
Sean Cassidy
- Board of Directors Member
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Mr. Cassidy is the Chief Financial Officer of Arvinas. He has over 20 years of experience in the life sciences industry, including serving as Chief Financial Officer of Axerion Therapeutics, a preclinical biotechnology company developing therapies for neurological diseases and injuries; Chief Financial Officer of CuraGen Corporation (NASDAQ: CRGN), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company; and Director and Controller of 454 Life Sciences Corporation, a life sciences company that developed and commercialized next generation DNA sequencing instruments and reagents.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Cassidy served at Deloitte, one of the big four public accounting firms with a broad base of clients in the healthcare space. Mr. Cassidy is currently a board member of ReNetX Bio and of the Friends of Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital, a nonprofit organization that helps improve the health and well-being of pediatric patients and their families.
Mr. Cassidy holds a B.S. from the University of Connecticut and is a Certified Public Accountant in the State of Connecticut.
Kenan Turnacioglu, Ph.D.
- Board of Directors Member
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Dr. Turnacioglu is currently Chairperson of PaigeAI a machine learning Pathology company spun out of Memorial Sloan Kettering. He also serves on the board of Immunai a biotech company working on mapping and reprogramming the immune system. In 2022, he joined the board of MassiveBio, a company deploying AI to match cancer patients with clinical trials.
In 2011, Dr. Turnacioglu co-founded PointState Capital LP and managed the Portfolios and investment teams in Healthcare and Consumer sectors before departing in 2018. From 2001 to 2010, he worked at Duquesne Capital Management LLC managing Healthcare investments. While at these positions he also served on the board of StemCentrx (2013-2016), Agensys (2004-2007), and NYU Langone Cancer Center (2010-2015). From 1998-2000, he worked at Credit Suisse as an analyst on the biotech team.
Dr. Turnacioglu earned a B.A. from Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania, before completing two years of a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. He currently resides in Manhattan with his wife, Kristin, and four kids.
Medical Advisory Board
John Hastewell, DPhil
- Medical Advisory Board
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John Hastewell served in many roles in his nearly 30 years at Novartis. Most recently, he was the Head of Biologics, responsible for the discovery of antibody, protein, and nucleic acid-based therapeutics. Previously as Global Head of the Program Office he worked on research strategy and portfolio management and oversaw the company’s strategic focus on building their biologics drug pipeline. He also served in several leadership roles at Novartis based in the UK, including Head of Thrombosis Research and leading the Immunology Platform, which coordinated research opportunities across all disease areas. He obtained his BA degree in biochemistry from Oxford and his DPhil from University of York in the UK.
Robert Hollingsworth, Ph.D.
- Medical Advisory Board
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Dr. Hollingsworth is the Chief Scientific Officer at Shoreline Biosciences. He oversees the research and development of Shoreline’s novel, best-in-class iPSC-derived immune cell therapies for cancer, including a pipeline of over ten programs. These programs include CAR-directed natural killer cells and macrophage, and have the potential to dramatically increase the accessibility and efficacy of immune cell therapies.
Dr. Hollingsworth has been successfully developing new cancer medicines using cutting edge technologies for over 25 years and contributed to several approved drugs. Prior to joining Shoreline, he served as the Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer for Cancer Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics at Pfizer where he and his team advanced five novel immuno-oncology therapies into clinical development. He also previously led cancer drug discovery at MedImmune to create antibody-based drugs and served as Head of the Oncology Therapeutic Area Team at GlaxoSmithKline where he conducted cancer genetics research and contributed to the development of several small molecule cancer medicines.
Dr. Hollingsworth studied biology and physics as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a Ph.D. in biochemistry, biophysics, and genetics from the University of Colorado. His post-doctoral studies elucidated the connections between cell cycle control and the function of tumor suppressor proteins.
Dr. Hollingsworth’s scientific expertise is broad and includes immuno-oncology, multiple therapeutic modalities, advanced technologies, and all phases of drug development. He has served as an adjunct assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, been an invited speaker and chair at numerous conferences, and received several prestigious awards. He has published many papers in top journals, including Nature, Science, and Cancer Research, and co-authored a seminal paper on the contribution of microenvironment factors to tumorigenesis that was named one of the top “milestones in cancer research” by Nature.
Rachel Humphrey, M.D
- Medical Advisory Board
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Dr. Humphrey is a medical oncologist with over 25 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. She is currently President and CEO of an Immuno-oncology start-up. She is also currently a member of the Board of Directors at Sporos Biosciences, and formerly an independent member of the Board of Directors of Xilio and CytomX Therapeutics, respectively.
Over the course of her career, she’s served as Chief Medical Officer in biotechnology companies, including Black Diamond Therapeutics, CytomX therapeutics and Mirati Therapeutics. She’s also held numerous senior leadership roles in large pharmaceutical companies including SVP and Head of Immuno-Oncology at AstraZeneca, and VP, Clinical Development and Immuno-oncology at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) where she supervised the development of ipilimumab (Yervoy) from early development to post-launch and founded/chaired the first Immuno-oncology working group.
Dr. Humphrey holds an M.D. from Case Western Reserve University and a B.A. from Harvard University. She received her training in internal medicine at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and started her career as an oncology fellow and staff physician at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD.
Ulf Landegren, M.D., Ph.D
- Medical Advisory Board
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Ulf Landegren received his MD and PhD in Uppsala, Sweden, before spending five years at California Institute of Technology. As professor of molecular medicine in Uppsala his research focuses on developing molecular tools to meet medical needs, from analyses of genetic variation with techniques such as oligonucleotide ligation assays and padlock probes to protein assays using oligonucleotide-conjugated antibodies in proximity assays for measuring protein expression levels in liquid samples or imaging their distribution in situ.
Professor Landegren is a member of EMBO, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Sciences at Uppsala. He is a member of several academic or industrial boards and advisory boards. He has authored 224 peer-reviewed publications, and he is inventor of 49 patents or applications. Work in his lab has so far given rise to 12 spin-out companies with a combined staff of more than 700 people, including two companies that are now publicly traded (Olink Proteomics and Q-linea). Technologies from his lab have been licensed to many leading international biotech and diagnostic companies.
Technical Advisory Board
Michael P. Snyder, Ph.D.
- Medical Advisory Board
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Michael Snyder is the Stanford Ascherman Professor and Chair of Genetics and the Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Dr. Snyder received his Ph.D. training at the California Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He is a leader in the field of functional genomics and multiomics, and one of the major participants of the ENCODE project. His laboratory study was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism and has developed many technologies in genomics and proteomics. These including the development of proteome chips, high resolution tiling arrays for the entire human genome, methods for global mapping of transcription factor (TF) binding sites (ChIP-chip now replaced by ChIP-seq), paired end sequencing for mapping of structural variation in eukaryotes, de novo genome sequencing of genomes using high throughput technologies and RNA-Seq. These technologies have been used for characterizing genomes, proteomes and regulatory networks.
Seminal findings from the Snyder laboratory include the discovery that much more of the human genome is transcribed and contains regulatory information than was previously appreciated (e.g. lncRNAs and TF binding sites), and a high diversity of transcription factor binding occurs both between and within species. He launched the field of personalized medicine by combining different state-of–the-art “omics” technologies to perform the first longitudinal detailed integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) of a person, and his laboratory pioneered the use of wearables technologies (smart watches and continuous glucose monitoring) for precision health. He is a cofounder of many biotechnology companies, including Personalis, Affomix, SensOmics, Qbio, January, Protos, Oralome, Mirvie and Filtricine.
Dieter Söll, Ph.D.
- Medical Advisory Board
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Dieter Gerhard Söll is a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Chemistry at the Yale University. He earned his B.S. and Ph.D. from Stuttgart University in 1962 and did his postdoctoral work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1962-1965 with Har Gobind Khorana. He was briefly an assistant professor at University of Wisconsin before joining the Yale faculty in 1967 and has been there since. He was named a Sterling Professor in 2006.
As a postdoc with Jack Strominger, he identified tRNAs that were involved in peptidoglycan formation leading to the discovery of novel aminoacyl-tRNA functions. He later sequenced the selenocysteine tRNA. His research is centered on the formation of aminoacyl-tRNA and tRNA synthetases. He is a member of the National Academy of Science, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1972 and 1989 and a Humboldt Fellow in 2000.
In addition to his academic work, he has been recognized as a leader in creating research opportunities for minority students at Yale University for summer research in the early 1970s.
David Weitz, Ph.D.
- Medical Advisory Board
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David A. Weitz is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University, where he has an appointment in both the Physics Department and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He received his B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Waterloo, and his PhD in Physics from Harvard. He leads the experimental soft condensed matter physics research group.
His research efforts include soft matter physics, biophysics and biotechnology. He is Director of Harvard’s NSF-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, and co-Director of the BASF Advanced Research Initiative. Dr Weitz is also a co-founder of Raindance Technologies, GnuBio, Capsum, HiFiBio, BioMillenia, 1Cell-Bio, Spherebio, NextGen Forensic Sciences, TCRx and Dragon Drop Inn.
In addition, he is a celebrated member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States.