Bringing biotechnology to the market: one researcher's journey

Magali Soumillon, Co-Founder of Flexomics, will talk about how she has developed a functional and genomic analysis technology, first as a researcher at University and then as an entrepreneur.

Magali will talk about the details of her research and how she explored a few of her own ideas, which in combination with her experiences, led her to the path of entrepreneurship.

This talk is for anyone interested in developing translational research with a potential impact on society.

Join us to learn more! Link here.

Speaker Bio:

Magali Soumillon is Co-Founder of Flexomics LLC, a Boston based startup company founded in 2019 that provides an innovative platform capable of simultaneous functional and genomic analyses of hundreds of thousands to millions of individual cells and cell-to-cell interactions. She will be speaking about her experiences developing life-science technologies, while still doing interesting research.

Magali graduated with a master’s degree in biotechnology at Ecole Superieure d'Ingenieurs de Luminy in Marseille, France, and then a PhD at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland focusing on evolutionary biology. She developed skills in molecular biology and genomics while also acquiring expertise in bioinformatics and computational biology. During her studies, Magali took advantage of opportunities to explore applied uses of research through an initial internship at 454 life sciences, later acquired by Roche during her undergrad and later on at the Broad institute of Harvard and MIT that she joined for her postdoctoral studies. There, she developed one of the first high-throughput single cell RNA-seq methods that she shared through various academic and industry collaborations.

From this point, Magali was able to continue to combine her experimental and managerial skills to get recruited into a couple of start-ups, including Berkeley Lights Inc., where she helped develop a novel instrument for the manipulation and analysis of individual cells. This experience showed her the exciting ups and downs, multidisciplinary and rapid growth possible within a startup environment, and led her to further into this world – ultimately leading her to co-found her own company, Flexomics LLC, which was recently awarded a $400,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the NIH and National Cancer Institute. Flexomics is now focused on building their first prototype – and is excited about it!

This event is sponsored by the Technology Development and Innovation Center. For more information, please contact Felix Rehnberg or Andrea Pensado from the R&D Cluster Programs section.