NEW YORK, June 22 - Rubicon Genomics has appointed Thomas Collet, a former health care venture capitalist, to lead the company as president and chief executive officer, the company said Friday.
Collet joined Rubicon, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based developer of DNA amplification technology, from Tullis-Dickerson, a healthcare venture fund in Ann Arbor where he was general partner. Prior to that, Collet served as vice president for business development at Integrated Protein Technologies, a unit of Monsanto. Collet also worked as a consultant to pharmaceutical and healthcare companies at McKinsey.
Rubicon specializes in developing alternatives to PCR for amplifying DNA sequences and identifying SNPs. The company's technology, called OmniPlex, involves reformatting chromosomes into new molecules called plexisomes that are more easily amplified and manipulated, the company said in a statement. The technology may ultimately have applications in personalized medicine, the company said.
The company also said Friday that the US Patent and Trademark Office had issued a patent on the company's OmniPlex technology.
"Thomas joins us at the perfect time in Rubicon's evolution as we have just established proof-of-principle for our OmniPlex technology, and are poised to commercialize our technology on an accelerated growth path," Richard Sloan, the company's director, said in a statement.
Rubicon was formed in 1998 by researchers at the University of Michigan and the Engelhardt Insitute of Molecular Biology in Moscow.