We ended up developing a technology that went to Asia for mass manufacturing and ushering in the era of the $1,000 genome in 2014. I ended up building up a team of 10 scientists and engineers, all working in Nano3. “All of a sudden, I was tasked with providing large numbers of chips to the company. “After about a year of working by myself or maybe with one other scientist from Illumina in Nano3, we got a hit,” Bowen recalled. While there, Bowen had used UC San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute facilities - namely, Nano3 - to develop DNA sequencing and genotyping chips in the historic effort to bring down the cost of sequencing the human genome to under $1,000. in physical chemistry (with Professor Robert Continetti) from UC San Diego, had spent more than a dozen years at Illumina. Rothemund, Ph.D., a former MacArthur Fellow, ran a lab that used DNA and RNA as engineering materials so they could perform biochemical computations or serve as scaffolds for arranging functional nanodevices he was the inventor of “DNA origami,” a method for folding arbitrary shapes from a long single strand of DNA.īowen himself, who earned an M.S. The venture was well matched to the expertise of its co-founders.īowen’s friend, Ashwin Gopinath, Ph.D., was an assistant professor at MIT and former research scientist at Google who ran a lab working at the intersection of complementary metal-oxide semiconductor nanofabrication, molecular self-assembly, biology and machine learning. A comprehensive view of an individual’s proteome provides an opportunity to have more accurate diagnoses and more effective treatments.” The proteome is something that can be acted upon immediately, as almost all therapeutics target interactions with specific proteins. “There are tremendously successful companies making tools to interrogate the genome, but that data lacks actionability,” Bowen explained. The goal was to offer a complete view of a patient’s proteome-the entire complement of proteins expressed-with a single sample. The team decided their new firm, which they named Palamedrix, would develop biosensors based on DNA. “It would be very valuable if we could develop technology to do rapid and sensitive detection.” “The pandemic highlighted an underserved area-rapid detection of various different pathogens such as COVID, the flu, and other viruses,” said Bowen. Would you be interested in chatting with us? Maybe participating?’”īowen responded that he was indeed interested, but first he had to get home.īowen did manage to catch a flight back to San Diego, where frequent evening calls among the trio evolved into an idea for a company. Between the two of them, they said, ‘You know, I think now’s the time to start a company. They couldn’t go into their labs anymore, and their students couldn’t either. “Both my friend and the PI he had worked with at Caltech were locked off campus. “It was a friend of mine who is a professor at MIT,” Bowen said. It was March 2020, and Shane Bowen '00, '05 was trying to figure out how to get home to San Diego from Australia, as the pandemic surged and regular travel routes and familiar routines began shutting down.
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