Our platform builds on their foundational work, which is being advanced by our growing team of passionate, curious and committed scientists.
CRISPR-mediated viral immunity
Designed by nature, harnessed by Ancilia
3960 Broadway, 6th Floor
Alexandria Launchlabs
New York, NY 10032
© 2024 Ancilia Bio, Inc.
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Prior to founding Ancilia, Alex was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Deep Science Ventures, a London-based early-stage biotechnology fund where she worked to scope out opportunities for company creation across the biotechnology arena.
Alex completed her PhD in Microbiology at Harvard University, where she discovered and characterized a novel mechanism of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. Her graduate work was published in Science Advances
Rodolphe is the T. R. Klaenhammer Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University. Prior to joining NC State, he was global R&D director at Danisco and Dupont, where he and his colleagues established the natural function of CRISPR-Cas systems in adaptive immunity in bacteria and harnessed this native function to vaccinate dairy cultures against bacteriophages. He received the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize for his work on CRISPR-Cas systems and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018. Dr. Barrangou is author or co-author of numerous scientific publications and is Editor in Chief of The CRISPR Journal.
In addition to his research, Dr. Barrangou is a co-founder and member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Intellia Therapeutics. He served on the Board of Directors at Caribou BioSciences and is a founding investor of Locus Biosciences. Dr. Barrangou holds a PhD in Molecular Genetics from North Carolina State University.
Before co-founding Ancilia, Davi was Associate Director of Discovery Informatics at Mammoth Biosciences. He completed postdoctoral training at UC Berkeley and the Joint Genome Institute, focusing on CRISPR and the global virome while collaborating with Jennifer Doudna.
Dr. Paez-Espino earned his doctorate in Synthetic and Biological Sciences at Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia in Spain. He has authored over 20 publications on virome analysis and bacterial-viral interactions, including papers in Nature and Nature Communications.
In addition to his work with Ancilia, Matt is a Research Scholar in Dr. Rodolphe Barrangou’s lab at North Carolina State University. He possesses extensive knowledge of next generation probiotics, bile acid metabolism and gastrointestinal infections with numerous publications on these topics in journals such as Nature Microbiology, Nature Communications, and PNAS.
Dr. Foley holds a PhD in Microbiology & Immunology from the University of Michigan, where he studied prebiotics and the gut microbiome
Before joining Ancilia, Daena worked at Bristol Myers Squibb supporting CAR-T cell manufacturing.
Daena received a BS in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she researched electrochemical biosensing methods. Her undergraduate research work was published in ACS Sensors and Frontiers in Chemistry.
Fotis has expertise in bioinformatics, specifically in analyzing the sequence, structure, and dynamics of biological macromolecules. He is concurrently a Postdoctoral Researcher at BSRC Alexander Fleming Institute, developing state-of-the-art methods for the analysis of biological data, and conducting large-scale metagenomics analyses for microbiome annotation and the discovery of novel, previously undescribed proteins and genes. Fotis has authored and co-authored numerous scientific publications, including in journals such as Nature, Nucleic Acids Research, and Bioinformatics.
He completed his PhD in Bioinformatics at National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, where his work focused on the structural study of biological membranes and membrane proteins.
In addition to his work as a bioinformatics consultant at Ancilia, Georgios is the Director of Research at BSRC Alexander Fleming Institute and serves as the Managing Director and co-founder of BioInnovation Greece. His contributions to the field have led to recognition as one of the top 2% of scientists globally in his domain.
Dr. Pavlopoulos has authored or co-authored numerous scientific publications including Nature, Cell, Science, NAR, and Nature Biotechnology. He holds a PhD in Bioinformatics from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-Heidelberg) as well as an MBA jointly from the Athens University of Economics and Business and the National Technical University of Athens.
Alexa recently joined Ancilia after receiving her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Toronto, where she investigated novel mechanisms underlying phage and bacteria interactions, which informs her current work at Ancilia.
Her knowledge of phages and CRISPR-systems is highlighted by a number of publications, including in Nature Communications. Beyond her work at the bench, Dr. Fitzpatrick received the University of Toronto TATP Teaching Excellence Award and served as a mentor for numerous initiatives including the Amgen Scholars Canada Program.
Prior to joining Ancilia, Ilia developed and optimized various biochemical assays and novel sequencing methods at GreenLight Biosciences.
Dr. Gelfat completed his Ph. in Bioengineering at Harvard University, where he engineered probiotics for biomedical applications, specifically related to E. coli Nissle 1917 for inflammatory bowel disease. His work has been featured in several scientific journals, including Nature Communications and PLOS Pathogens.
Before joining Ancilia, Maria worked as a Web Software Engineering and Data Scientist at Desquared. She possesses expertise in data science, front-end development, and bioinformatics, which she uses to analyze and visualize biological data, supporting Ancilia’s research and innovation efforts.
Maria received an MSc in Bioinformatics from the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, where her work focused on 3D Network Visualizations. Part of her thesis was published in NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics.
Jared recently joined Ancilia after receiving his BS and MS degrees in Biomedical Engineering from Yale University, where he researched polymer nanoparticles for therapeutic drug delivery. This research resulted in a scientific publication Jared co-authored in Nature Communications.
At Yale, Jared was also Publisher of the Yale Scientific Magazine. He has experience in partnering and in managing internal platform development through his previous part-time roles at ElevateBio and FitBiomics.
