Mission
Firefly BioWorks is introducing an open platform allowing industrial, academic and clinical scientists to develop and use multiplexed assays on standard laboratory instrumentation. Our mission is to develop reliable and affordable solutions for the comprehensive monitoring of biological function.
Management Team
Davide M. Marini, Ph.D. is a co-founder of Firefly Bioworks. He obtained his Ph.D. in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, where he studied the self-organization properties of short artificial peptides and their application to the design of novel biomaterials. He completed his postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Prof. David Clapham at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston, where he developed nano-sensors for detecting the activity of ion channels and membrane transporters. Before deciding to pursue his passion for biotechnology, Dr. Marini worked as a marketer of fixed-income derivatives at J.P.Morgan in London. He obtained an M.B.A. from Collège des Ingénieurs (Paris, France) and a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Politecnico of Milan (Italy). Dr. Marini is responsible for the business strategy of our firm.
Daniel C. Pregibon, Ph.D. is a co-founder of Firefly Bioworks and developed the technical foundation of our firm during his doctoral work under the supervision of Prof. Patrick Doyle in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT and Prof. Mehmet Toner at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. His interest in medicine dates back to undergraduate research at Case Western Reserve University, where he obtained his B.S. in Chemical Engineering and performed fundamental studies to aid in the search of an effective malaria vaccine. Dr. Pregibon is responsible for the technological development of our platform and for defining our scientific vision.
Andreas Windemuth, Ph.D. has worked in the field of computational biology for the past 15 years. Prior to joining Firefly, Dr. Windemuth was Chief Technology Officer of Genomas, a company advancing DNA-Guided Medicine and personalized healthcare. Prior to Genomas, he was Senior Director of Computational Research and Development at Genaissance Pharmaceuticals, where he was in charge of the development of haplotype sequencing algorithms. Dr. Windemuth started his biotechnology career at CuraGen Corporation (New Haven, CT), where he was instrumental in developing many of the company's genomic technologies. Dr. Windemuth is a fellow of the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds (Stuttgart, Germany), and and has done post-doctoral research on biomolecular modeling at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (Urbana-Champaign, IL) and Columbia University (New York, NY). Dr. Windemuth obtained his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Technical University of Munich.
Scientific Advisory Board
Patrick S. Doyle, Ph.D. is a co-founder of Firefly Bioworks and Associate Professor in the Chemical Engineering Department at MIT. He received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Prof. Doyle received a Chateaubriand Fellowship to pursue postdoctoral studies at the Institute Curie in Paris where he studied single molecule DNA dynamics. A major theme of his current research is the translation of a molecular understanding of transport phenomena into new microfluidics-based processes. He was the recipient of a NSF CAREER Award, 3M Innovation Award, MipTec PolyPops Foundation Award, and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He is also the winner of the "Pioneers of Miniaturization" from the Lab on a Chip, Royal Society of Chemistry and Corning Inc, Rothschild-Yvette Mayent-Institute Curie Award, and Joliot Chair at E.S.P.C.I. in Paris. Prof. Doyle is the chairman of our scientific advisory board.
David P. Bartel, Ph.D. is a Professor of Biology at MIT, a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Prof. Bartel has made major contributions to recent advances in understanding the role of micro-RNAs (miRNAs) in gene regulation. His lab is uncovering both the widespread influence of miRNAs on metazoan gene expression and the roles that miRNAs play during growth and development of plants and animals. He developed a methodology to accurately predict the regulatory targets of miRNAs in both plants and animals and ascertained the molecular consequences and biological roles of miRNA regulation. The results of this research indicate that more than half of human protein-coding genes are conserved regulatory targets of miRNAs and that the miRNA-mediated regulation of one of these genes is important for preventing human cancers. He also discovered heterochromatic siRNAs, which direct DNA silencing, and other types of small regulatory RNAs.