Snap Bio CEO and leadership

Mark founded and is currently President and CEO of Lassogen, Inc., a biotech company focused on advancing lasso peptides as a new class of programmable therapeutics for treating challenging diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders. Mark previously founded and was President and CEO of Snap Bio, a preclinical biotech company that is developing novel bispecific small molecules for oncology (currently showing promise in animal efficacy trials). Prior to Snap Bio, Mark served as EVP and CTO at Genomatica, where he built the team, IP portfolio, product pipeline, and technology platform to rationally engineer metabolic pathways and microorganisms for small molecule biosynthesis. Prior to Genomatica, Mark was Senior Vice President and Head of R&D at Diversa Corporation (2000 to 2006), where he led a large team that leveraged state-of-the-art metagenomics, environmental library screening, and directed evolution technologies to develop a range of products in the areas of food, nutrition, animal feed, and pharmaceuticals, including natural products. From 1996 to 2000, Mark was a director at Chiroscience Pharmaceuticals, a U.K. company focused on developing chiral drugs (e.g., levobupivacaine) and technologies for producing pharmaceuticals (acquired by Celltech in 1999). Mark was a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Duke University for four years, following five years in Central Research at DuPont, where he invented the DuPHOS technology for the generation of novel amino acids, peptides, and other therapeutics.Mark received a B.A. in chemistry (minor in philosophy) from Rutgers University. He earned a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Yale University and performed postdoctoral work at MIT with Nobel laureate Barry Sharpless. Mark has published over 80 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts and is an inventor on over 200 issued patents. Mark has received many honors and awards and has presented over 300 lectures at major conferences and universities.