Faculty Feature: Dr. Chris Mason

We are excited to introduce our first ever faculty feature! We want to use this platform to show off the amazing people here in the Tri-I ecosystem who combine academic rigor with entrepreneurial spirit. Michael Retchin (SVG Communications Director) and I had the opportunity recently to sit down with Dr. Chris Mason of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at WCM for our first ever faculty feature.

SVG: You are the co-founder of multiple active biotech companies [Biotia, Onegevity, BridgeOmics], which is not something that many academics have on their resume. At what point did you transition from the “classic” academic path (focusing exclusively on grants and publishing) to the entrepreneurial mindset? What fueled that transition?
 
Mason: When I was a grad student, I was focused a lot on Drosophila work. There’s not an immediate, obvious leap of thinking about what’s the commercial opportunity in fruit flies. Rather, I started thinking about entrepreneurship as a postdoc at Yale when I was working on software for human genetics. I was writing code for doing linkage analysis - looking at large pedigrees to find inherited disease-causing variants. One day, a resident at the medical school came into the lab and said, “Hey, I just met this guy who runs a large horse racing company, and could we use the same methods to figure out which genes enhance horse performance?” What if we started a company that did horse genetics? We thought about it. But we had full-time jobs, no IP, no funding. It was high-risk, low-reward. The second real moment happened during my Fellowship at Yale Law School, working on genomic ethics. I started hearing about gene patents, that there could be intellectual property on the gene itself. To be able to patent a gene, such that no one else could sequence your patented gene, seemed like a very strange idea, especially since it would chill innovation on gene sequencing and diagnostics. So eventually, I served as pro bono Expert Witness on a patent litigation suit against Myriad Genetics in 2008 until 2013, and began to think that genomics should be democratized. So Jeff Rosenfeld and I launched a company called Genome Liberty. But then, the FDA cracked down on direct-to-consumer companies…so that company isn’t around anymore. Like any good entrepreneur, my first company failed.

SVG: Any tips for grad students who want to start companies?

Mason: Be proactive. Some of your ideas are probably better than you think they are. Some are probably worse than you think they are. But some are probably good enough to actually get a patent or as a trade secret, form the basis of a new company. There are lawyers on staff at Cornell whose job is to meet with you to discuss your ideas and patentability. Be fearless.

SVG: You have a new book coming out in April, The Next 500 Years. What motivated you to write it, and what is the role of the academic and entrepreneurial communities in this 500 year plan?

Mason: The original genesis was from a blog post from a 2011 iGEM competition. An MIT Press editor saw the post and asked, “Hey, do you want to write a book?” I had written the post way back in 2010, and actually, and it’s quite amazing -- we’ve already gone further than I thought we would by now.
Regarding academia and entrepreneurship, we will definitely need both. I think academia is a variegated, fertile bed for creating inventions, ideas, new discoveries, and basic research, like fundamental understandings of how molecules work or tissues function. But there are certain things that you shouldn’t do in academia. Like scaling a platform for 10 million people; if you’re in a lab with 10 people, that is unlikely to work. Or manufacturing medicines, or building a spaceship, and so forth. Ultimately, we’ll need academic and government labs to dream up unique ideas and inventions, and commercial avenues to deploy them at scale. We’ll need both for sure, for the next 500 years -- or even 5 million years. Maybe that’s the next book.

SVG: What was your favorite part to write?

Mason: I love the aspirational themes - things that could happen. Like what if any organelle from any organism could be used in any other organism? I also did a map of how many genes had been discovered in the past 30 years versus exoplanets. By now, there are hundreds of “Goldilocks” exoplanets. That gives me great optimism.