SAMPLING successfully completed its first technological milestone validating the concept of living diagnostics in a laboratory setting. The milestone represents the foundation of the SAMPLING platform and is the first example of living organisms genetically engineered to analyze cellular objects. The milestone also has financial consequences in unlocking further funding to support validation of the approach in a practical setting.

Dan Lysak

Dr. Todd Peterson is Founder and Principal at GenApex Biotechnology Consulting, a board practice, investment, and advisory services LLC based in Coronado, California. He has more than 35 years of experience in biotechnology and life sciences research and development across the areas of molecular and cell biology, nucleic acids, and genomics product and technology development.

His experience encompasses clinical diagnostics, life science research tools and drug discovery technologies, products, and markets. Previously, Dr. Peterson was Chief Scientific Officer at The Allen Institute in Seattle, Washington, overseeing science and technology strategy and growth initiatives across unit Institutes for Brain Science, Cell Science, Immunology, and the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group. Prior to joining the Allen Institute, Dr. Peterson was Chief Technology Officer at Synthetic Genomics, Inc. (SGI), a leader in synthetic biology and applied genomics technologies developing a robust portfolio of breakthrough solutions addressing major global issues. Prior to joining SGI, Dr. Peterson led Genomics and Synthetic Biology R&D at Invitrogen/Life Technologies (now Thermo Fisher Scientific), a global leader in life science tools. Prior to Life Technologies, Dr. Peterson held R&D positions with increasing leadership responsibilities and scope at Genicon Sciences, Trega Biosciences, Hybritech, and Gen-Probe, where he focused on technology research, product development, and commercialization. Dr. Peterson was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne Germany after receiving his Ph.D. in microbiology at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. He obtained his M.A. in biological sciences and B.A. in molecular biology and biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Dan Lysak

Daniel Lysak is the deputy head of the Department of Hematology and Oncology at the Charles University Hospital in Pilsen and an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Pilsen, Charles University. His unit serves a population of 1.5 million people and is the biggest center for transplant therapy in the Czech Republic. Daniel has over 20 years of GCP experience with more than 8 pharmaceutical or academic clinical trials (phase II-III) in hemato-oncology.

Dr. Lysak’s research activities are focused on areas such as treatment of GVHD with mesenchymal stem cells, NK cell immunotherapy and quantification of minimal residual disease in leukemias. His work is published in close to 100 publications. Daniel is also a member of the examination board for specialization in hematology and transfusion medicine and a board member of the Bioimplantology society and the Czech CLL study group.

Peter Kuhn

Peter Kuhn, PhD, is Founder and Chief Scientific Advisor at Epic Sciences. He is the principal architect of the Epic Sciences platform and has invested his career into the research, development, and the clinical utility of the liquid biopsy. His vision of translating innovation in research to meaningful products for patient care is driving his everyday efforts.

Dr. Kuhn is the Dean’s Professor of Biological Sciences, Professor of Medicine, Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California. He also serves as the Director of the USC Michelson Convergent Science Institute in Cancer (CSI-Cancer) and the deputy director of the Convergent Science – Virtual Cancer Center. He holds a chair as Honorary Professor of Cancer Science at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.

Previously, Dr. Kuhn held faculty appointments at The Scripps Research Institute and at Stanford University. While at Stanford, Dr. Kuhn established the structural genomics research enterprise and focused his research on technology developments in structural biology that were utilized by breakthrough research such as Dr. Roger Kornberg’s (Nobel prize 2006) structure determination of the RNA Polymerase. Dr. Kuhn joined Scripps and advanced technologies that led to the structure determination of the human b2AR GPCR with collaborators including Dr. Brian Kobilka (Nobel prize 2012).

Dr. Kuhn is a physicist who trained initially at the Julius Maximilians Universitat Wurzburg, Germany, before receiving his Masters in Physics at the University of Albany, Albany, NY in 1993 including research with Drs. Michael Radermacher and Joachim Frank (Nobel prize 2017) in electron microscopy and his Ph.D. in 1995 with Dr. Patrick VanRoey in X-ray crystallography. He then moved to Stanford University where he joined the faculties of Medicine and Accelerator Physics as tenure track Assistant Professor. From 2002 to 2014 he established the Physics Oncology program at The Scripps Research in La Jolla, CA as tenured Associate Professor before joining USC in 2014. His research and inventions have resulted in over 300 peer-reviewed publications, which have been cited over twenty-thousand times.

John Cumbers

John is the founder and CEO of SynBioBeta, the leading community of innovators, investors, engineers, and thinkers who share a passion for using synthetic biology to build a better, more sustainable universe. He publishes the weekly SynBioBeta Digest, hosts the SynBioBeta Podcast, and wrote “What’s Your Biostrategy?”, the first book to anticipate how synthetic biology is going to disrupt virtually every industry in the world.

John has also founded BetaSpace, a space settlement innovation network and community of visionaries, technologists, and investors accelerating the industries needed to sustain human life here and off-planet. He has been involved with multiple startups, and is an operating partner and investor at the hard tech investment fund Data Collective, and he is a former bioengineer at NASA. John has earned a PhD in Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry from Brown University and is originally from the UK.

Pavel Bruzek

Pavel Bruzek Jr. has a background in chemical engineering and business administration, and has been involved with Draslovka since high school. He moved through all relevant positions: production, R&D, sales, investments, strategic development department and then in 2009 he became Technical Director. Now CEO of Draslovka Holding, he is leading the ongoing global expansion.

During his tenure as CEO of Draslovka, Pavel has led acquisitions of Chemours Mining Solutions Business that operates the largest solid sodium cyanide plant in the world in Memphis, Tennessee and Sasol’s sodium cyanide business, as a first major investment into the African continent. He also established the Draslovka Services Group with HQ in Melbourne focusing on trial support, product development on a global scale and has received approval of the ozone – friendly EDN in Australia.

Martin Simonek

Martin Simonek has been active in private equity and venture capital since 2013 through a family office B3 Holding based in Prague, Czech Republic. Prior to that, Martin has held the role of a senior analyst at Bloomberg in London, covering renewable energy markets and production value chain during the booming years of the industry.

Since moving to Prague, Martin has been involved with startups across several industries with a particular focus on biotech. Through B3 Holding Martin monitors about 13 companies within its portfolio at various level of maturity.

At present Martin holds a role of Head of Investor Relations at the largest investment of the family office which deals with specialty chemicals and aims for an IPO. Martin holds a bachelor’s degree from State Univerity of New York in Political Science and Economics and a master’s degree from London School of Economics in Global Politics.

Larry Stambaugh

Larry Stambaugh brings extensive experience in building entrepreneurial and global companies. He has been the CEO, Chairman of the Board or Director of several global public and private companies. During his more than 40-year career Mr. Stambaugh has served as a top executive and his visionary leadership has built successful management teams around his ability to awaken the leader within his associates to have them achieve extraordinary results. His well-developed process has effectively guided the board and management to realistically access their strengths and weakness and direct the organization into new businesses and discontinue underperforming activities and business units.

Mr. Stambaugh has raised over $500 million of capital in private and public financing and he has taken a company public in both the U.S. and Europe. He has completed several large strategic partnerships with Fortune 100 companies.

Mr. Stambaugh has had a penchant for board activities and corporate governance practices for over three decades. He regularly speaks on the best practices and current issues in leadership and in corporate governance. He has received the “Director of the Year” recognition an unprecedented three times for his work in corporate governance leadership and education. He has also founded and led an annual corporate governance meeting that became one of the top meetings in the U.S.

Daniel Georgiev

Cofounder and CEO

Daniel has over 20 years of experience in deep tech organizations. He has led companies in consumer and biotech sectors, and has established research programs and laboratories in systems engineering, synthetic biology, and machine learning.

Daniel works at the interface of genetic engineering and mathematics to make complex biological behavior easier to engineer and measure. Together with his team, he founded the deep tech startup Sampling Human that is deploying Synthetic Biology to make single cell measurement easy. His work is published in top peer-reviewed journals spanning medicine, biotech, nanotech, mathematics, and engineering. He has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the City prize for his elevation of the regional biotech sector, the NSF graduate research fellowship, and the George E Breece prize for academic excellence.

Prior to launching Sampling Human, Daniel was the CTO at Nanda Home. He received his PhD in Systems and control theory and MS in Applied mathematics from the University of Michigan and completed an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington.