The foundation for my career in life sciences was established years before I entered the industry, beginning with a passion for biology back in elementary school. It might have been the day I first learned about the various systems in our bodies and how they are affected by health and disease. Perhaps it was sitting beside my grandfather as he worked in his garden, learning how to keep plants healthy and make them grow. Or maybe it was, like many children, being fascinated by the age of the dinosaurs and how nature produced such fabulous specimens, long lost to extinction.
Whatever the inspiration, I have been hooked on biology ever since. My interests eventually gravitated toward the microscopic realm: cells, molecular biology, biochemistry. I entered the field during the era of human genome sequencing, as we began refining methods to manipulate living systems for both research and therapeutic development.
After studying cell and molecular biology, I returned to Massachusetts to work in the Cambridge drug discovery sector. This was during the explosion of life science technology that created the global hub still thriving and advancing here today.
Two key things shaped my early career perspective:
- Most drug discovery programs fail to reach even Phase I of clinical trials.
- The advanced tools available in industry research vastly improved the reliability and repeatability of results in terms of both time and effort.
A great example of this relationship between scientific advancement and enabling technology is next generation sequencing. The Human Genome Project took over a decade of painstaking work to sequence a single human genome, while the equipment of today delivers highly accurate whole genome sequences in just a few hours. The pace of efficiency in scientific techniques mirrors something like Moore’s Law.
My personal experience with this technology-technique relationship came when our lab installed a phosphor imaging system. For anyone who has ever done a Western blot by hand, you may recall transferring your radioactive protein samples from a membrane to x-ray film, exposed overnight in a lead lined case. Sometimes the protein failed to transfer. Sometimes the membrane would slide into the plate and smear the results, making analysis impossible. Sometimes the film would get exposed and become completely unreadable. The process leading up to the last overnight step of membrane and film would often take a full day in the lab to complete, and you would not know your results until the next morning. A whole day of work would be wasted by bad films, a loose case, or poor technique. The phosphor imager eliminated all the issues with the last step by scanning the membrane directly and producing a clear, beautiful digital image. It even had software to help analyze the protein bands.
It was experiences like these that impressed upon me how crucial reliability is in scientific tools. Scientific instruments, equipment, reagents and consumables must be dependable. There is simply no substitute for being assured that your tools will perform consistently. Cell and molecular biology are so complex and has so many unknowns that introducing additional uncertainty from an erratic apparatus is wholly unacceptable.
Those of us who have put on a lab coat and picked up a pipettor or have gowned up to seed a bioreactor train understand this intimately. We work with multifarious systems whose constituents we often cannot see even with a microscope, so we rely entirely on our toolkits to run these processes for us. If we do not trust or believe in the outcome, then all is lost. The scientific method is predicated on repeatable results that prove or disprove a hypothesis under defined test conditions.
My fascination with the latest tools took me out of the lab to focus on bringing innovation to scientists for the past two decades. I have worked across areas ranging from laboratory equipment and reagents to industrial scale bioprocessing for traditional antibody therapeutics and advanced therapies.
Throughout my career, the cost of medicine has always stuck out to me. We all know from experience that healthcare, especially novel drugs, are costly. What we do not all necessarily know is that for every drug a developer brings to clinic, dozens or hundreds of others have failed.
In part, the expense of a new and patented therapeutic is intended to offset the cost of the majority of research and development programs that have failed, but it is also because the tools we use to research and manufacture drugs are expensive. Scientific devices are precision implements that incur expense in their development and manufacture. Nonetheless, a lot of the expense comes from the overhead of large companies or the high-investment, high-return model in start-ups – creating an environment of profiteering all the way up the value chain.
Ensorcell is here to break that cycle and lift that spell! And I am fortunate to lead an exceptional team whose diverse expertise makes our mission possible. Each brings unique insights from years of laboratory and manufacturing experience. I invite you to visit our company page to meet the talented individuals driving our mission to deliver high-quality scientific tools at accessible prices.