Erik Holmlin, President and Chief Executive Officer of Bionano Genomics, Inc. (NASDAQ:BNGO), has more than two decades of experience developing innovative solutions and companies in the life sciences and health care industries.
His experience includes positions at GenVault Corporation as CEO, Exiqon A/S as CCO and Becton Dickinson as Vice President of Marketing and Development.
In 2001, Dr. Holmlin led the formation and financing efforts of GeneOhm Sciences, Inc. and orchestrated the company’s acquisition by Becton Dickinson in 2006. He also served as an entrepreneur in residence — EIR — at leading life-science venture capital firm Domain Associates, LLC. Dr. Holmlin was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena — Caltech.
He holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech and MBAs from UC Berkeley and Columbia University.
In his exclusive 1,777 word interview in the Wall Street Transcript, Dr. Holmlin describes the upside for his company:
“The opportunity that is in front of Bionano and the Saphyr is made possible because while traditional/commercial sequencers are incredibly robust — Illumina is an example of a sequencing company — those sequencers are able to analyze some types of genomic variation but not all types, and the Saphyr system analyzes the types of genomic variation that sequencers don’t.
The types that we analyze are called structural variations, and they involve a change in structure of the genome as opposed to a change in its sequence.”
This proprietary platform technology enables genetic sequencing not covered by the Ilumina product line:
“But in the middle, there’s a whole class of variation called structural variation, and sequencers are essentially blind to those because they don’t so much involve a change in sequence, but rather, they involve a change in genome structure, the location of the sequence on a particular chromosome.
Now, structural variations are very important in cancer, for example. Ninety percent of blood cancers are caused by a structural variation, and yet sequencers cannot detect those.
So we built the Saphyr to be a structural variation detector. It’s based on direct imaging of the chromosomal fragments that are contained in the cells, and that imaging reveals certain patterns that in turn we’re able to read and interpret and, therefore, determine the structure of the genome.
What’s unique about us is that we can see structure, but we cannot see point mutations, and it’s the inverse for sequencers. For example, the sequencers that Illumina sells can see point mutations but not structure. So we are a very perfect complement to sequencers out in the field.”
Read the entire 1,777 word interview with Dr. Holmlin, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript.
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