Personalis combines expertise both in the technology of sequencing and in interpretation, with an extensive history of peer reviewed publication and commercial success. Broad adoption of medical genome interpretation will require accuracy befitting regulatory approval, both in variant detection and interpretation.
More than half of the founding team are MDs, and this reflects the company’s commitment to serious medically-focused results, at quality standards eventually suitable for regulatory approval and insurance reimbursement. The team includes experienced PhD scientists, who know that the research community also cares deeply about accuracy, thoroughly substantiated and peer-reviewed. Personalis has exclusively licensed key intellectual property originating in the labs of the founders. Lastly, the Personalis team includes business people with decades of experience in genetic analysis, who know that the democratization of genome sequencing will also require high-quality customer support for interpretation, lab by lab, genome after genome.
Michael Fitzpatrick joined Personalis in April 2013 as Vice President of Worldwide Sales. During Mike’s 30 year career in the biotech field, he has built commercial teams focused primarily in the genomics space.
He spent 20 years at Applied Biosystems where he held executive level positions including Vice President of The Americas, Vice President of Sales for the Molecular Biology Division and Vice President of Global Key Accounts. In 2006, Mr. Fitzpatrick joined a start-up, Codon Devices, where he built the initial commercial team and launched their synthetic biology technology globally.
Most recently, Mr. Fitzpatrick was with OpGen, Inc. as Vice President Global Sales where he built the global commercial sales and support teams to launch their Optical Mapping technology.
Mr. Fitzpatrick received a B.S. in Microbiology from the University of Maryland College Park
Carol J. Tillis joined Personalis in November 2011 with over 20 years of experience in senior financial management, much of it related to DNA sequencing.
From 2004 to 2010, she was Vice President of Finance at Pacific Biosciences, Inc. Ms. Tillis started at Pacific Biosciences as its first full-time finance person during the company’s early development stages, and helped transition the company into a commercial entity. From 2002 to 2004, Ms. Tillis was a Financial Consultant for several early stage start-up companies.
From 1999 to 2001, she was Director of Finance of Entigen Corporation, a life-science software company. From 1991-1999, she held various positions at Molecular Dynamics (Amersham Corporation) most recently as the Finance Manager Sales Marketing and Services where she helped start the international finance operations.
From 1985-1991, she worked at several banks as a Corporate Loan Officer. Ms. Tillis received a B.S. from Marquette University in 1985.
Dr. Haudenschild joined Personalis in early 2012 to build the companys professional services department. Prior to this role he was an Associate Director in charge of commercial sequencing at Illumina Inc. in Hayward, California. His team was responsible for the preparation and next-generation sequencing of thousands of DNA and RNA samples.
Dr. Haudenschild was previously the Senior Manager of Technical Accounts at Lynx Therapeutics (which later became Solexa, Inc. and which was later acquired by Illumina).
At Lynx and Solexa he was involved in developing the first massively parallel protocols for the study of small RNA and DNA. In 1995, he received his Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Enzymology from the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France after completing a Master’s degree in 1989.
He completed his postdoctoral research in Molecular Biology at Washington State University, Pullman from 1995 to 1997 and at the University of California at Berkeley from 1997 to 1999.
Chris is a Partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners. He has over 20 years of venture capital experience and invests in areas including networking, storage, cloud, software/SaaS, big data as well as mobile technologies and applications. Chris has been named to the Forbes Midas List of top venture capital investors nine times since its introduction in 2001. He has also backed over 10 first-time CEOs who have led their startup companies though successful IPOs. Chris has served as a director of a number of public companies including eHealth (EHTH), Fusion-io (FIO) and Riverbed Technology (RVBD) where he currently serves as Chairman of the Compensation Committee.
Prior to Lightspeed, Chris was a General Partner of Weiss, Peck & Greer Venture Partners which he joined in 1991 to focus on seed and early-stage investments in technology companies. Previously, he worked in corporate finance and capital markets roles at Goldman, Sachs & Co. after serving as a software engineer at IBM.