Aged nineteen, Mark decided to pursue a career in medicine to serve others and to make a difference in people’s lives. His curiosity led him down a path of clinical service and laboratory discovery. He became fascinated by synthetic biology, as he saw it as the key to a new generation of medicines. He is the founder of bit.bio and co-founder of the cultured meat start-up Meatable.
bit.bio is a synthetic biology company providing human cells for research, drug discovery and cell therapy. The company applies a patented safe harbour gene-targeting approach (opti-ox™; Pawlowski 2017) to inducibly express transcription factor combinations that reprogram human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) into highly defined and mature human cell types.
The required transcription factor combinations are discovered using high throughput screens and advanced data analysis (bit.bio discovery platform). The company is currently building a clinical pipeline and marketing a wide range of cells and disease models for research and drug discovery under its ioCells brand including nerve cells, immune cells and muscle cells.
The company was spun out of the University of Cambridge in 2016 and has since raised approximately $200M from Arch Ventures, Foresite Capital, Milky Way, Charles River Laboratories, National Resilience, Tencent, and Puhua Capital among others.
Starting a business can be an exhilarating and fulfilling experience, but it can also be incredibly challenging and stressful.
Being taken seriously by investors, industry partners, key opinion leaders, advisors and future employees is a key challenge for founders.
How do you get legendary tech entrepreneur and investor Hermann Hauser and Nobel Prize laureate Greg Winter onto your board? How do you get the leading lights of stem cell research to become your scientific advisors? How do you attract the talent to scale to more than 200 employees? How do you raise £200+ mio of capital from the leading life science investors?
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