Frank Lee swears it’s not a midlife crisis. Lee, 49, left his CTO post at Millennium Pharmaceuticals to become president and CEO of EngeneOS, a startup with fewer than 10 employees incubated by NewcoGen. “I was interested in going back to an earlier stage company,” says Lee, who remembers well Millennium’s nascent phase. Another attraction was the added responsibility: “I wanted to move from the pure science and technology role.”
The switch to CEO and president should accomplish that. EngeneOS hopes to develop a business around disciplines as varied as biology, genomics, physics, engineering, and electronics. The goal is to engineer electronic devices using peptides or nucleic acids as scaffolds. Potential applications exist in pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, and chemical synthesis.
Lee expects the company to grow through internal expansion of its science and business teams as well as through strategic partnerships. Lee, whose background is in molecular biology, considers his move to EngeneOS an “opportunity to do something fun and different.”
— Meredith Salisbury