Pangea Systems/DoubleTwist IncCo-founder and CEO
Oct. 1989 - Feb. 2002Oakland, California, United StatesIn 1999, California-based Pangea Systems/DoubleTwist assembled and annotated the first-ever draft of the human genome, beating the version championed by Dr. Craig Venter by more than six months. Using publicly available data and computational and analytic tools they assembled themselves, co-founders Dexster Smith, Edward Kiruluta and Joel Bellenson made history. This great achievement built on earlier work at Stanford University, where this team designed and built one of the first databases to link genotype and phenotype. At Pangea/DoubleTwist they went on to develop LifeSeq, which was the first database linking gene expression data to tissue, disease and drug treatment specificity. They further extended their series of "firsts" by designing Rosetta, the first-ever large-scale protein expression analysis system. We pioneered the first Web connectivity to SQL databases. The first Grid Computing system, the first genomic and proteomic datawarehouses and datalakes and application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
We raised $88 million from leading Silicon Valley biotech venture capitalists such as Kleiner-Perkins, Mayfield Fund, Institutional Venture Partners, and several world reknown, high tech venture investors.