Octant is scaling drug discovery to navigate the complexity of human disease
Octant is a therapeutics company building drugs that match the complexity of human diseases.
We are building drugs with novel mechanisms of actions guided by massive datasets in engineered human cells that unlock insights between genetics, chemistry, biochemical function, and disease phenotypes. Our platform uses synthetic biology, high throughput multiplexed assays, synthetic chemistry, and computation to engineer and interrogate drugs, proteins, and signaling pathways at unprecedented scales.
Despite the proliferation of genomic data, clinical data, and new biological technologies, many of the most pressing diseases in society are proving intractable with the current approaches. In many disease areas, we have more information than we dreamed we’d ever had, and we still have no idea where to start-- what exactly to drug in the first place? Some conditions present as one disease, when they’re actually a multitude of different diseases. In many diseases, we know a particular gene is involved in the disease, but have no idea which molecular mechanism will “fix” it.
Octant envisions a new approach to tackle these problems. We believe that recent advances in synthetic biology enable a new type of biotechnology. For example, we can today engineer cells to compute biological information at far greater accuracy and throughput than computational simulation. We set out on a journey to map the biochemical mechanisms that link genetics and chemical features to the disease. Because, ultimately, it’s the biochemical mechanisms that we drug.
Since then, we’ve been busy building a different type of company- of and by technologists- for patients.
We focus on complex but genetically validated diseases that society is falling behind on. We’ve set out to tackle very hard problems in multi-factorial diseases. Because if we don’t do it, who will?
We're a therapeutics company integrating and scaling new technologies.
We’re building an antedisciplinary movement to chart new approaches to drug discovery. Whether you’re a scientist, an engineer, or in operations, we’re working together to build a new type of company. It’s a challenging but fun journey.
We’re hacking the most complicated systems on the planet. It’s hard. We keep our sense of humor about it (if there’s a way to make something a company competition, lookout).
From gene sequencing, to synthesis, to editing, to automation, to compute, society is equipped with technologies we couldn’t have dreamed of ten years ago. Why do what everybody else is doing when there’s so much more to be done?
We’re mixing and remixing technologies to decode and target disease. We’re straight with each other, kind to each other, and stretching each other towards the next breakthrough.
These are early days of the next age of drug discovery. Come invent the future with us.
Sri is a biologist that has helped build technologies, labs, and companies in synthetic biology, functional genomics, and bioinformatics over the last 20 years. He is passionate about developing more rational ways to understand and engineer biology.
Sri is a co-founder at Octant and an Associate Professor at UCLA in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, where his lab has worked on building large-scale ways of empirically exploring questions in protein biochemistry, human genetic variation, gene regulation, chemical biology, synthetic biology, and functional genomics.
Sri previously worked at the Wyss Institute and Harvard, where he built numerous technologies in gene synthesis, DNA information storage, gene editing, and large-scale multiplexed assays. He helped build Gen9, a gene synthesis company, as a member of the SAB and was the first employee of Joule Unlimited, an engineered algal biofuel company. He is a Searle Scholar (2015), NIH New Innovator (2014), and received his ScD in Biological Engineering at MIT and BS in Bioengineering at UC Berkeley.
Sri is originally from New Jersey, by way of Philadelphia and Kansas, and was born in North Carolina. He enjoys eating, getting outdoors, and traveling with his wife and two children.
Ramsey has spent his career building high-performance teams and technology companies. Before Octant, he was an executive at Dropbox, where he had roles leading Dropbox's communications, public policy & government affairs, human resources, legal, and trust & security teams. During that time Dropbox raised $1+ billion in capital, grew to more than 500 million users, and was the fastest SAAS company in history to reach $1 billion in revenue run rate. Prior to Dropbox, Ramsey was a Vice President at Google, where he managed Google's commercial legal groups and negotiated some of the internet industry's largest partnerships.
Before that, Ramsey was a technology attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and a Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has also done pro bono work representing indigent clients seeking political asylum. Ramsey received a B.S. in Chemical & Biochemical Engineering from Rutgers University and a J.D. from NYU.
Ramsey is a Board member at the Rutgers College of Engineering, and Represent.us, a grassroots political reform organization.
Ramsey grew up in Athens, Greece and Sparta, NJ. He enjoys hiking, camping, cooking over fire, punk music, and wandering through neighborhood art galleries.
Dr. Jason Kelly is the co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, the leading horizontal platform for cell programming. Headquartered in Boston, Ginkgo is a synthetic biology company that enables customers across industries to program cells as easily as we can program computers. Ginkgo supports the development of applications ranging from vaccine manufacturing and new pharmaceutical modalities to fragrances, sustainable dyes, and biosynthetic cannabinoids, as well as pandemic response and biosecurity tools including K12 pooled testing for COVID-19. Ginkgo is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker $DNA. Prior to Ginkgo, Jason received B.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering and Biology and a PhD in Biological Engineering all from MIT.
Mark Murcko was an early leader in structure-based drug design and has directly contributed to nine marketed drugs spanning HIV, HCV, cystic fibrosis, and glaucoma. He is a Founder, Board member, and was the interim CSO at Relay Therapeutics. More recently he was the founding CSO and remains a board member and advisor to Dewpoint Therapeutics. In addition, Mark is a senior lecturer in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT, and has served on numerous scientific advisory boards and corporate boards of directors for a diverse range of organizations. Mark was chief technology officer and chair of the SAB of Vertex Pharmaceuticals and was responsible for the identification, validation and implementation of disruptive technologies across R&D. Mark is a co-inventor of the HCV protease inhibitor Incivek (telaprevir), as well as Agenerase (amprenavir) and Lexiva (fosamprenavir), Vertex’s two marketed drugs for the treatment of HIV. In addition, he guided the early efforts of Vertex’s cystic fibrosis program that has produced four marketed drugs.
Prior to Vertex, Mark worked at Merck Sharpe & Dohme, where he helped discover multiple clinical candidates, including Dorzolamide, a carbonic anhydrase inhibitor for the treatment of glaucoma which was commercialized in two approved drugs, Trusopt and Cosopt. Trusopt was the first medicine in history to come from a structure-based drug design program. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the GRC and the Board of Advisors of the Boston Museum of Science. He is a co-inventor on more than 50 issued patents and has co-authored more than 85 scientific articles. Mark holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Yale University.
We're a group of scientists and builders driven to find new therapeutics for complex diseases.
Akshay is a machine learning scientist and geneticist with a background in learning and probability theory.
He did postdoctoral work at Stanford Genetics with the Kundaje lab, developing models to derive biological insight from large-scale functional genomic data. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC San Diego with Yoav Freund after spending time in several machine learning industry research labs, and has experience developing semi-supervised, nonparametric, and sequential learning methods. He grew up in India and Southeast Asia in addition to the US, and enjoys traveling, improv comedy, running, history, and being a mad (sports) fan.
Alan is research associate focused on furthering Octant’s deep mutational scanning capabilities.
Alan obtained his B.S. from Duke University where he double-majored in Biophysics and Quantitative Economics. At Duke, he worked in Charlie Gersbach’s lab harnessing CRISPR-Cas9-based epigenetic editors to study force-modulated transcriptional regulation mechanisms directing how cells respond to distinct mechanical niches within the body. For his undergraduate thesis, he developed fluorescent reporter systems to measure enhancer activity within single cells using high-resolution microscopy and flow cytometry.
Alan grew up in Shanghai, China and Detroit, MI. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with friends, playing soccer, eating great food, and watching Arrested Development.
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Prior to Octant, Alex was an early employee at Relay Therapeutics (NASDAQ:RLAY) where he held multiple roles in strategy and business/corporate development. He was formerly an investor across both early and later stage investments, as a venture investor at B Capital Group and as a private equity investor at Charlesbank Capital Partners. Alex started his career as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group.
Alex received an A.B. from Harvard University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He enjoys travelling and any sport that serves as an excuse to spend time in the great outdoors.
Bryan joined Octant as a Research Associate and will assist in running and optimizing Octant's technology. He recently received his B.S. in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics with a minor in Bioinformatics from UCLA. There, he took part in a virology lab where he focused on characterizing genetic and genomic relationships between bacteriophages infecting separate host genera.
In his free time Bryan enjoys trying new foods, learning about languages, hiking, and programming.
Carter is a molecular biologist with a background in molecular diagnostics, assay development, and genetic engineering of mammalian cells.
He received his M.S. in Clinical Laboratory Sciences from Rush University Medical Center and completed his clinical training at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. He is an ASCP certified molecular biologist and worked as a clinical laboratory scientist in molecular diagnostics at the University of Illinois Medical Center and the Denver VA Medical Center. He received his Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from the University of Nebraska Medical Center then completed his postdoctoral training at UCSF. He worked as a scientist at Guardant Health before joining Octant in 2021.
Outside of the lab, Carter enjoys spending time outdoors with his family and dog.
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Conor is a protein biochemist and molecular biologist by training. He is currently employing Octant's multiplex capabilities toward the optimizing and scaling of our Deep Mutational Scanning (DMS) approach, with the goal of harnessing this technology as a tool for rational genetics- and structure-driven drug design.
Conor received his PhD from the University of California, San Francisco in the lab of Adam Frost. There he worked on the biochemical and structural determinants of Ribosome-associated Quality Control (RQC). Prior to this he did his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, where he worked under Liam Holt studying the evolutionary plasticity of kinase specificity and poly-glutamine repeat expansions in yeast. Before graduate school Conor also spent some time at the University of Copenhagen in Rune Linding's lab studying the proteomic effects of cancer therapies. Conor thrives working at the intersection of many disciplines and is fascinated with how biology emerged in the universe. He believes mechanistic dissection of molecules in the context of mutational plasticity can help tackle some of the most complex problems in biology and disease.
Outside of work you'll find Conor traveling, skiing, scouting new breweries, playing tennis, experimenting with hot sauce recipes, and exploring unusual agave spirits.
Rapid deployment of SARS-CoV-2 testing: The CLIAHUB. Crawford ED, et al. (2020). PLoS Pathogens.
Curt is a chemical engineer with a background in analytical biochemistry and metabolic engineering. He earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at MIT, completed post-doctoral studies at UC Berkeley, and was an early employee at Ginkgo Bioworks for several years. After returning to the west coast in 2014, he led Stanford ChEM-H's Metabolic Chemistry Analysis Center, before joining Octant in 2020.
After hours you will find hanging out with this family, at home. After the pandemic ends, troubles will melt like lemon drops and sometimes Curt might get high above the chimney tops, or at least farther away from his house.
Divya is a member of the Operations team. A graduate of the University of Southern California, she received her Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration while playing D1 Women’s Golf. Upon graduation, she spent 2 years as a healthcare consultant at Ernst & Young, primarily focusing on financial transformation.
Having grown up in LA, Divya is excited to experience the Bay Area. In her free time, you can find her golfing, hiking, or trying new restaurants.
Drake is a Research Associate at Octant.
Prior to Octant, Drake established a laboratory program and served as lab manager at Alibi Ale Works, Lake Tahoe. He also interned at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus, where he investigated different drugs candidates for difficult-to-treat melanomas.
Drake received his B.S. in Biomedical Microbiology and Biology from the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse. There, he established four different research projects, including bioelectromagnetism via magnetotactic bacteria and acetaminophen metabolite toxicity in aquatic systems.
In his free time, Drake enjoys playing outside, writing music, and trying new things!
Eric is a molecular biologist with a background in synthetic biology and functional genomics. He completed his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology at UCLA in the lab of Sriram Kosuri. His graduate work focused on constructing a massively parallel reporter assay for mapping olfactory receptor-odorant interactions and performing a deep mutational scan of the Beta-2 Adrenergic Receptor. Outside of the lab you can find him playing basketball, sailing, or going to shows.
J. S. Bloom, L. Sathe, C. Munugala, E. M. Jones, M. Gasperini, N. B. Lubock, F. Yarza, E. M. Thompson, K. M. Kovary, J. Park, D. Marquette, S. Kay, M. Lucas, T. Love, A. Sina Booeshaghi, O. F. Brandenberg, L. Guo, J. Boocock, M. Hochman, S. W. Simpkins, I. Lin, N. LaPierre, D. Hong, Y. Zhang, G. Oland, B. J. Choe, S. Chandrasekaran, E. E. Hilt, M. J. Butte, R. Damoiseaux, C. Kravit, A. R. Cooper, Y. Yin, L. Pachter, O. B. Garner, J. Flint, E. Eskin, C. Luo, S. Kosuri, L. Kruglyak, V. A. Arboleda, Massively scaled-up testing for SARS-CoV-2 RNA via next-generation sequencing of pooled and barcoded nasal and saliva samples. Nat Biomed Eng. 5, 657–665 (2021).
Erin is a protein biochemist/biophysicist with a background in developing high-throughput screening platforms.
Before joining Octant, she completed her Ph.D. in Chemistry & Chemical Biology at UCSF in Jaime Fraser’s lab. Her thesis work broadly focused on the functional characterization of enzyme conformational states using deep mutational scanning, in vitro kinetics, and structural techniques.
Outside of the lab, Erin loves to get outside to bike, run, hike, and backpack.
Gabrielle manages the lab and facilities at Octant. She got her PhD in Medical Science at the University of Florida, researching the molecular basis of learning, memory, and behavior in Octopus neural circuits.
Gabrielle’s lab management experience comes from building molecular biology labs on boats ranging from small personal sailboats to mega-yachts, to cargo ships. She has always enjoyed facilitating and conducting innovative research at the cutting-edge of new frontiers, so Octant is a natural fit for her.
Outside of the lab, Gabrielle enjoys hiking and cooking with her family. She also enjoys volunteering as a scientific advisor for the Ocean Genome Atlas Project nonprofit organization.
Galen is an organic chemist who designs high-throughput robotic chemistry pipelines. He earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at MIT, completed post-doctoral studies at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. He worked as a chemist at Stemcentrx and at Carmot Therapeutics, before joining Octant in 2020.
In his free time he enjoys sailing and going for bike rides with his kids.
Helen is a member of the SynBio Apprentice Fall '21 cohort.
Prior to joining Octant, Helen obtained her B.S. in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Johns Hopkins University. She conducted research as an undergraduate in Dr. Thomas Lloyd’s lab at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she explored the role of the autophagy pathway in the pathogenesis of familial ALS.
In her spare time, Helen enjoys playing video games, embroidering silly designs, and exploring the great outdoors.
Henry is a structural and molecular biologist. As a scientist, Henry develops technologies to enable the rapid development of synthetic biology tools at Octant.
Henry received his PhD in Biochemistry from UCLA, where he studied the molecular architecture and structure of the telomerase enzyme. Prior to graduate school, he was the 2nd hire at Inhibrx, where he helped start the lab and develop antibodies and antibody generation techniques.
Henry received his B.S. and M.S. at UCSD in molecular biology where he did research in protein engineering and evolution, and bioinformatics. Outside of work his hobbies include Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, sailing, and rock climbing.
Idriss is a seeker of truth, solutions, joy, peace, and forever happiness on the ops team. Born and raised in Douala, Cameroon, he transitioned to the U.S to pursue his education. From the year round tropical sun of Cameroon, he first landed in the frigid arctic temperatures of Minnesota where he graduated from Southwest Minnesota State University with a Bachelor's in Business Administration and Marketing. Longing for more gelid temperatures, he moved to Syracuse University where he completed a Master of Science in Finance. His hobbies are working out, adventurous road trips and he hates long walks on the beach.
Janet is an Executive Assistant (EA). Prior to Octant, she was an EA at Dropbox for 7 years supporting over 40+ managers, VPs, and C-level executives, including the CEO & COO, during this time. She also has extensive experience in hospitality and restaurant management, as well as event planning, dating as far back as 2002.
Janet is originally from Los Angeles. She enjoys crossing things off a to-do list, making things look pretty, and catching Pokémon (on Pokémon Go) with her two kids.
Jeff has a background in biophysics and cell biology and has worked in areas related to microscopy and sequencing. At Octant he’s helping to further push the performance and scale of the company’s core platform technology. Jeff received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley where he studied nucleocytoplasmic transport and then investigated how yeast respond to nutrient deprivation during a postdoc at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland.
Prior to joining Octant, he was a scientist at Zymergen.
Besides tackling exciting problems in biology, Jeff enjoys hiking and playing ultimate frisbee, and he’s also an instructor at the Berkeley Kendo Club.
An enthusiastic experimentalist and leader, Jennifer joins Octant as a Scientist on the Synthetic Biology team.
Jennifer spent the past 5 years at Zymergen, where she had the opportunity to contribute both scientifically and as a team leader. She initially worked on developing high-throughput methods for genetic engineering of microbes using robotics. She then moved to the Automation team, where she led the Automation Applications team and was part of the core Automation leadership team. This work involved people management, building light but effective processes around cross-team communication, prioritizing work requests from all of the R&D and Ops lab departments across Zymergen, and creating tools for the team such as career ladders and team goals. Prior to Zymergen, Jennifer worked briefly at Molecular Devices, where she supported their high content imaging system (IXM). Jennifer did her postdoc work at Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, in the lab of Jost Enninga, where she worked on better understanding host factors involved in Salmonella infection of the human gut. She did her PhD work at UCSD with Kit Pogliano, using imaging and biochemical techniques to study sporulation in Bacillus subtilis.
In her free time, Jennifer is an avid rock climber. Her favorite places to climb are Red Rock, NV and Siurana, Spain, where she and her husband have spent many vacations. More recently, she has spent less time climbing and more time with her daughter, Hazel, who was born in May 2020 and is super fun to get to know as she can express more and more each day.
Jimin is a synthetic and systems biologist with a background in developing high-throughput functional assays to explore bacterial gene regulation.
Prior to joining Octant, he finished his PhD in Systems biology at Columbia University with Harris Wang. His thesis work focused on mapping sequence function relationships of bacterial sigma factors using saturation mutagenesis and dissecting regulatory mechanisms of cis-regulatory sequences in high-throughput with promoter libraries.
Outside the lab he enjoys playing boardgames, finding new hobbies to fall into, eating and drinking.
Johan has spent the last 7 years in biotech working with metabolic disease and weight loss. As an employee of Carmot Therapeutics Johan spearheaded the in vivo pharmacology effort, establishing all in vivo models necessary to push an in house project from inception to Phase 1 clinical trials.
Johan spent his early education getting an MSc in cell and molecular pharmacology at Lund University (1999), with a focus on intracellular movements of GPCRs. Johan followed up his MSc with a PhD from Lund University (2007) extending his studies from his undergraduate degree in GPCR pharmacology - exploring several families of GPCRs. During his postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF (2007-2013) Johan applied his findings from his MSc and PhD to animal models of addiction and tolerance, learning crucial methodology in physiological and behavioral readouts in rodent models, drug delivery and survival surgery techniques.
Along the way Johan has taught medical and biomedical students (lecture series), trained research students, technical staff and scientists, and managed technical staff and scientists in cross functional research teams in both academia and biotech.
Jordan is a member of the SynBio Apprentice Fall '21 cohort. She will graduate with a B.A. in molecular biology from Scripps College May 2021.
As an undergraduate she worked in a protein engineering lab to create better luciferases for use in in vivo multicomponent bioluminescence imaging (BLI). She also worked on computational projects, like analyzing structures of unannotated small open reading frame (sm-ORF) encoded proteins en masse and using Rosetta to predict beneficial mutations to introduce into luciferases for BLI applications.
Outside of science her interests include environmentalism, stand-up comedy, and serenading her dog (to no avail) on the piano.
Josh is a geneticist and computational biologist. He is interested in understanding the genetic basis of complex traits. He develops technology and computational methods to better understand the relationship between genetic variation and trait variation in populations with a primary focus on yeast genetics. His recent work involves high-throughput variant engineering with CRISPR/Cas9 to identify causal genetic variants as well as the development of new experimental and computational methods to comprehensively identify the heritable genetic factors underlying gene expression differences and other complex traits in very large populations. After studying Neuroscience at UCLA as an undergraduate, Josh earned his PhD in Molecular Biology from Princeton with a certificate in quantitative and computational biology.
Justin is a member of the SynBio Apprentice Fall '21 cohort. Prior to joining Octant, Justin attended Johns Hopkins University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Molecular and Cellular Biology. During his undergraduate career, Justin worked in the Davis Lab in the Bloomberg School of Public Health where he explored the relationship between single-cell bacterial growth and stress in murine and microfluidic systems. Justin also founded Agara Bio, a student-led community wet-lab at Johns Hopkins University, and received the Emerging Leader Award for Undergraduates.
Outside of the lab, Justin enjoys playing the guitar and (more recently) getting absolutely pitted.
Kyle is a quantitative cell biologist with a background in proteomics, next-generation sequencing, and CRISPR screening.
He finished his Ph.D in Chemical and Systems Biology at Stanford University with Mary Teruel where he studied the impacts of gene expression noise on signaling and metabolic pathways, and cellular decisions.
Outside of work, Kyle enjoys travel, the outdoors, and playing with his dog.
Leon is a molecular geneticist. He builds platforms to engineer biology and designs the sensors that read out the cellular response to the chemical world.
Leon did his post doctoral work in Karsten Weis's lab at UC Berkeley where he developed tools to measure the dynamics of the transcriptome and applied these tools to uncover the relationship between how proteins are made and how long the transcriptome persists in the cell. Prior to this, he did his doctoral work in Angelika Amon's lab at MIT where he elucidated how cells translate spatial information into chemical signals in the context of mitotic checkpoints. It was also at MIT where in Drew Endy's lab Leon helped to construct the first designed synthetic genome and organism.
Leon rock climbs, enjoys mixing up cocktails and wrangling his cats.
Refactoring bacteriophage T7. Chan LY, Kosuri S, Endy D. Mol Syst Biol. 2005. 1:2005.0018.
Lizvette joined Octant as a Research Associate. She currently helps operate Octant’s sequencing pipeline. Lizvette received her B.S. in Biology with a concentration in Biomedical Sciences from CSU Sacramento. There, she was part of a molecular ecology lab where she focused on looking at how changes in gene expression affect individual and population differentiation in marine organisms.
Prior to Octant, Lizvette worked as a Molecular Biology RA where she screened for genetic mutations in multiple cell lines using Next Generation Sequencing.
Outside of the lab, you can find Lizvette chilling with her 2 cats & 1 dog, traveling, or just taking a nap.
Maris is a member of the SynBio Apprentice Fall '21 cohort.
A graduate of Pomona College, she received her Bachelor’s degree in Molecular Biology this past June. During her time as an undergraduate, Maris performed research through the UW Department of Genome Sciences in the lab of Samuel I. Miller where she studied the evolution of the Cystic Fibrosis gut microbiome and at the UCSD Center for AIDS Research in the lab of Davey Smith where her work focused on screening for drug resistance mutations in HIV sourced from different anatomical tissues.
When not in the lab, Maris enjoys playing the guitar, cooking, and going to the beach with friends.
An energetic and motivated leader, Meghan Ginley Arthurs is a member of the Octant Operations team.
Meghan comes to Octant with a diverse background in business, government, public policy, and communications. She possess a keen understanding of strategic operations with entrepreneurial attitude. Most recently, Meghan served as the Operations Manager for Genentech Roche’s Global Product Development (PD) Informatics team. At Genentech Roche, she was responsible for the redesign and implementation of PD Informatics operating model and managed a $180M informatics portfolio. Prior to that, Meghan served as the Assistant Director for the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California (USC). There she oversaw operations, marketing and brand management, as well as external and donor relations.
Meghan holds a master’s degree from the USC Marshall School of Business and an undergraduate degree in Politics from the University of San Francisco.
In her free time, Meghan enjoys adventures anywhere near or on the ocean with her husband and dog, loves college and professional football, and dreams to someday be a balloon carrier in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Before joining Octant, Michelle advised the asset management industry as an attorney at a large global law firm and worked in sales, training and marketing at Johnson & Johnson. She was shortlisted by Chambers in 2019 as a “Future Leader” for her commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion in the legal profession.
In addition to her law degree from Northwestern, Michelle received her MBA from Drexel University and a B.S. in health studies from Georgetown University. She serves on the regional alumni club boards for Georgetown University and Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.
Michelle enjoys food and sailing in the San Francisco Bay and further afield.
Morgan joined the team as a SynBio Apprentice and will assist in running and optimizing Octant’s technology.
Morgan received her B.S. in Biochemistry from Santa Clara University. There she worked in a surface spectroscopy lab where she studied peptoid adsorption to lipid membranes for important implications in development of new antibacterial drugs. She also worked as an intern at ProNovus Bioscience, expressing and purifying a particular membrane protein transporter and characterizing its function.
In her free time Morgan enjoys reading, hitting the slopes in Tahoe, and watching Grey’s Anatomy.
Naomi is a quantitative cell biologist by training. At Octant she's had her fingers in a few different areas including recruiting, establishing the SBA program, building Octant HQ, demonstrating Octant's multiplexed platform technology, building cell engineering, and more.
Naomi received her PhD from the University of California, San Diego under Roy Wollman quantifying how cells communicate with one another to determine their position in relation to a wound. She's passionate about bringing science to the public through effective scientific communication and meaningful technological advances.
Outside of work you'll find Naomi spending time with her family and two dogs, hiking, running, and playing the piano.
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Nathan Lubock is a computational biologist interested in deriving insights from large-scale experiments. Before joining Octant, he completed his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at UCLA under Sriram Kosuri. There he developed computational tools to understand and improve methods for multiplexed gene synthesis and GPCR-ligand interaction screens. In his free time, Nathan spends too much money on wine.
A Scalable, Multiplexed Assay for Decoding Receptor-Ligand Interactions. Jones EM, Jajoo R, Cancilla D, Lubock NB, Wang J, Satyadi M, Cheung R, March CD, Matsunami J, Kosuri S. bioRxiv, 358739.
Structural and functional characterization of G protein–coupled receptors with deep mutational scanning, EM Jones*, NB Lubock*, …, S Kosuri. eLife, 2020
A scalable, multiplexed assay for decoding GPCR-ligand interactions with RNA sequencing, EM Jones, R Jajoo, D Cancilla, NB Lubock, …, S Kosuri. Cell systems, 2020
Massively scaled-up testing for SARS-CoV-2 RNA via next-generation sequencing of pooled and barcoded nasal and saliva samples, JS Bloom, L Sathe, C Munugala, EM Jones, M Gasperini, NB Lubock, …, VA Arboleda. Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2021
Nicholas is a software engineer at Octant. He works on scaling Octant’s platform technologiesand improving software best practices.
Nicholas’ undergraduate thesis under Margo Seltzer and Cynthia Rudin focused on scaling interpretable machine learning methods. His Master’s work under Pietro Lio and Jim Haseloff involved building metabolic models of cell-free systems. More recently, Nicholas spent a few years working at BenevolentAI as a software engineer focused on target identification and machine learning infrastructure.
Nicholas enjoys running, hiking, playing squash, reading, cooking, and, most importantly, eating.
Pedro is a member of the SynBio Apprentice Fall '21 cohort.
Pedro is an engineer passionate about developing technologies to improve human health. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering with a focus in biomechanics from MIT, where he worked on projects spanning microbiology, neuroengineering, computational biology, and aerospace engineering. In the Lauffenburger Lab, Pedro used single-cell RNA-seq to extract insights about the tumor microenvironment in mouse models of PDAC. Pedro has also held industry internships at Novartis and BridgeBio, and has engaged in humanitarian efforts abroad.
Originally from Bogota, Colombia, Pedro loves to indulge in nice weather, good food, and great music.
Ramsey has spent his career building high-performance teams and technology companies. Before Octant, he was an executive at Dropbox, where he had roles leading Dropbox's communications, public policy & government affairs, human resources, legal, and trust & security teams. During that time Dropbox raised $1+ billion in capital, grew to more than 500 million users, and was the fastest SAAS company in history to reach $1 billion in revenue run rate. Prior to Dropbox, Ramsey was a Vice President at Google, where he managed Google's commercial legal groups and negotiated some of the internet industry's largest partnerships.
Before that, Ramsey was a technology attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and a Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has also done pro bono work representing indigent clients seeking political asylum. Ramsey received a B.S. in Chemical & Biochemical Engineering from Rutgers University and a J.D. from NYU.
Ramsey is a Board member at the Rutgers College of Engineering, and Represent.us, a grassroots political reform organization.
Ramsey grew up in Athens, Greece and Sparta, NJ. He enjoys hiking, camping, cooking over fire, punk music, and wandering through neighborhood art galleries.
Samir is a recent graduate from the University of Arizona with a B.S. in Molecular and Cellular Biology. During undergrad, Samir played football while assisting Dr. Lisa Nagy research the evolution of arthropod body plans/appendages and axial patterning in mollusks and other lophotrochozoa phyla.
Born in Hayward, Samir is excited to return to the Bay Area with his new role in Operations.
In his free time you can find him working out, watching sports, or playing video games.
Sarah is a cell biologist with a background in high throughput screening.
She received her B.S. in Biological Sciences from University of Maryland Baltimore County. Sarah has worked in various industry labs over the years. She got her start at Precision Antibody, making custom monoclonal antibodies for customers. She then went to DNA Electronics, where she supported the development of a machine to rapidly diagnose sepsis. After that, Sarah returned to the Bay Area where she is originally from and worked at Marin Biologic Laboratories- a contract research organization- performing various cell-based assays for clients.
Before coming to Octant she worked at Carmot Therapeutics where she ran high throughput drug screening assays and developed cell-based assays to further characterize screening hits.
Outside of the lab, Sarah enjoys mountain biking, snowboarding, playing video games, and binge watching shows with her two cats.
Scott is a computational biologist passionate about developing usable tools for analyzing new types of high-throughput, biological data. He completed his PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in the lab of Dr. Chad Myers at the University of Minnesota, where his thesis work focused on the design and analysis of high-throughput, chemical-genetic interaction screens in yeast.
Outside of the lab, Scott enjoys international travel, playing the bass, cooking, and drinking non-IPA craft beer.
Sri is a biologist that has helped build technologies, labs, and companies in synthetic biology, functional genomics, and bioinformatics over the last 20 years. He is passionate about developing more rational ways to understand and engineer biology.
Sri is a co-founder at Octant and an Associate Professor at UCLA in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, where his lab has worked on building large-scale ways of empirically exploring questions in protein biochemistry, human genetic variation, gene regulation, chemical biology, synthetic biology, and functional genomics.
Sri previously worked at the Wyss Institute and Harvard, where he built numerous technologies in gene synthesis, DNA information storage, gene editing, and large-scale multiplexed assays. He helped build Gen9, a gene synthesis company, as a member of the SAB and was the first employee of Joule Unlimited, an engineered algal biofuel company. He is a Searle Scholar (2015), NIH New Innovator (2014), and received his ScD in Biological Engineering at MIT and BS in Bioengineering at UC Berkeley.
Sri is originally from New Jersey, by way of Philadelphia and Kansas, and was born in North Carolina. He enjoys eating, getting outdoors, and traveling with his wife and two children.
Stacie is a Scientist in the Chemistry group with a background in chemical biology, metabolomics and (bio)synthesis.
She received her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University under the supervision of Prof. Elizabeth Sattely. Her thesis work focused on medicinal plant natural product biosynthesis and engineering, accomplished with metabolite analysis of plant extracts and enzymatic assays by LC-qToF and metabolic engineering approaches for yield optimization.
Outside of the lab, Stacie enjoys traveling, cooking, and perhaps the combination of the two: trying out different cuisines.
Tao Zheng is our medicinal chemist. She received her PhD in organic chemistry from Michigan State University in 2006 and spent two years at UC Davis as a postdoctoral fellow. She returned to China to begin her career in process chemistry and custom organic synthesis. In 2016, she brought her talents back to the United States, working for Nanosyn, Inc in Santa Clara CA for five years before finally becoming an Octanaut in September of 2021.
She enjoys watching movies, cooking, and spending quality time with her cat, Pinky.
Theo is a biologist in the Platform group with experience in assay development and the study of cancer therapies. He received a B.S. in Biology, with a minor in Biochemistry, at the University of San Francisco. At Roche Molecular Systems, he participated in the research and development of medical diagnostic assays for targets such as HIV and genetic mutations implicated in lung cancer. Then, at UCSF under Dr. Catherine Smith, he researched mechanisms of response and resistance to targeted drug therapy for acute myeloid leukemia. Outside of the lab, Theo enjoys golfing, hiking, and following his Bay Area sports teams.
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Will is part of the latest batch of synthetic biology apprentices.
Will received his B.S. in Computer Science and B.S. Microbiology from the University of Florida. As an undergrad, he was a member of Michael Kladde's lab, where he developed high-throughput bioinformatic tools to explore epigenomic data. For his thesis, he used CRISPR/cas9 to profile a mismatch repair gene enhancer.
He also was a founding member of iGEM Team UFlorida 2018, a student-led synthetic biology team that engineered a novel gut probiotic and won UF's first ever medal from the competition.
Will likes reading, backpacking, (social distanced) weightlifting, and—obviously—programming.
Charles S. Zuker is an American molecular geneticist and neurobiologist of Chilean descent. His lab, in collaboration with Nick Ryba at the NIH, have transformed our understanding of cell signaling and mammalian taste. Zuker is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Janelia Research Campus. Zuker is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After more than 20 years at the University of California, San Diego, he began his appointment at Columbia University in 2009.
Debora is a mathematician and computational biologist with a track record of using novel algorithms and statistics to successfully address unsolved biological problems. She has a passion for interpreting genetic variation in a way that impacts biomedical applications. During her PhD, she quantified the potential pan-genomic scope of microRNA targeting and combinatorial regulation of protein expression and co-discovered the first microRNA in a virus. As a postdoc she and her colleagues cracked the classic, unsolved problem of ab initio 3D structure prediction of proteins using a maximum entropy probability model for evolutionary sequences. She has developed this approach to determine functional interactions, biomolecular structures, including the 3D structure of RNA and RNA-protein complexes and the conformational ensembles of apparently disordered proteins. Her new lab at Harvard is interested in developing methods in deep learning to address a wide range of biological challenges including predicting the effects of genetic variation and sequence design for biosynthetic applications.
Mark Murcko was an early leader in structure-based drug design and has directly contributed to nine marketed drugs spanning HIV, HCV, cystic fibrosis, and glaucoma. He is a Founder, Board member, and was the interim CSO at Relay Therapeutics. More recently he was the founding CSO and remains a board member and advisor to Dewpoint Therapeutics. In addition, Mark is a senior lecturer in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT, and has served on numerous scientific advisory boards and corporate boards of directors for a diverse range of organizations. Mark was chief technology officer and chair of the SAB of Vertex Pharmaceuticals and was responsible for the identification, validation and implementation of disruptive technologies across R&D. Mark is a co-inventor of the HCV protease inhibitor Incivek (telaprevir), as well as Agenerase (amprenavir) and Lexiva (fosamprenavir), Vertex’s two marketed drugs for the treatment of HIV. In addition, he guided the early efforts of Vertex’s cystic fibrosis program that has produced four marketed drugs.
Prior to Vertex, Mark worked at Merck Sharpe & Dohme, where he helped discover multiple clinical candidates, including Dorzolamide, a carbonic anhydrase inhibitor for the treatment of glaucoma which was commercialized in two approved drugs, Trusopt and Cosopt. Trusopt was the first medicine in history to come from a structure-based drug design program. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the GRC and the Board of Advisors of the Boston Museum of Science. He is a co-inventor on more than 50 issued patents and has co-authored more than 85 scientific articles. Mark holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Yale University.
