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Blood sample, full molecular picture
A single tube of blood, read like a biopsy
Most liquid biopsies go hunting for mutations - the typos in a tumor's DNA. Michael Milburn runs a company built on a stranger idea: that the broken fragments of DNA a tumor sheds into the bloodstream still carry the imprint of which genes were switched on. Read the fragments right, and a blood draw tells you not just what is broken, but how the cancer is behaving.
That is the bet behind GeneCentric Therapeutics, the Durham, North Carolina company where Milburn is CEO and President. Its ExpressCT platform infers gene expression from circulating tumor DNA. Its newer GenomicsNext system pulls double duty - mutations and fusions on one hand, thousands of gene-activity measurements on the other - from the same sample. The pitch is deceptively simple: stop choosing between what a tumor is and what it is doing.
In June 2025 the company closed an initial $8.0 million Series C led by Hatteras Venture Partners, with Alexandria Venture Investments, IAG Capital Partners, and Labcorp alongside. The money is aimed squarely at commercializing GenomicsNext. By April 2026, GeneCentric was on stage at AACR with clinical data for its fragmentomics-based ExpressCT technology - the first peek at whether the strange idea holds up in patients.
With a single blood sample from a cancer patient, our GenomicsNext liquid biopsy platform can determine the gene expression of drug target genes, molecular subtypes, and predictive gene signatures, in addition to mutations and fusions.
- Michael Milburn, on the GenomicsNext platform
It is a long way from a crystallography lab in Berkeley. But the through-line is unmistakable. Milburn has spent four decades chasing the same quarry - the molecular machinery of cancer - and switching tools every time the field handed him a sharper one.
ExpressCT™
Reads RNA-style gene-expression signatures out of cfDNA fragment patterns - expression from a sample that only contains DNA.
GenomicsNext™
One blood draw, two readouts: high-fidelity DNA variants plus thousands of gene-expression measurements.
PurIST®
A single-sample classifier shown in JCO Precision Oncology to help guide first-line pancreatic cancer therapy.
He started by taking the cancer switch apart
In the late 1980s, working in Sung-Hou Kim's lab at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Milburn helped solve some of the first crystal structures of the Ras protein - the molecular switch that, when stuck in the "on" position, drives roughly a third of human cancers. The papers ran in Science and Nature. They are still cited as foundational.
The finding was the kind of thing you can almost see. Compare the normal protein with a single-mutation cancer version, and a loop that grips the energy-carrying molecule GTP is subtly enlarged. That small structural sag slows the off-switch, leaving the growth signal jammed on. Milburn was, in effect, photographing the precise atomic moment a healthy cell tips toward malignancy.
He finished his PhD in physical chemistry at Berkeley in 1991, after a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Michigan, and did a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. Then he left the academy for industry - and kept changing the lens.
GeneCentric is at the forefront of developing RNA-based informatics and data science for next-generation cancer therapies - with a focus on matching treatments to patients.
- Michael Milburn
Three readouts of biology, one obsession
Milburn's career reads like a tour of how scientists have learned to read disease. At GlaxoWellcome, Structural Genomix, Plexxikon, and Sirtris Pharmaceuticals - the resveratrol-and-sirtuins company later bought by GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million - he worked the protein-structure side of drug discovery, helping turn three-dimensional shapes into drug targets.
In 2005 he became Chief Scientific Officer at Metabolon and switched scales entirely, from proteins to metabolites - the small molecules that are the chemical exhaust of a living cell. Over more than a decade he built Metabolon's research organization into a premier metabolomics platform. Across all of it he authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers.
Then, in September 2018, he joined GeneCentric as Chief Scientific Officer. Within four months he was running the company. The lens had changed again - this time to RNA and the fragments of DNA floating in blood - but the question had not moved an inch: what is this cancer, and what can we do about it?
A CEO who still teaches
- He has worked across three distinct ways of reading biology - protein structure by crystallography, small molecules by metabolomics, and nucleic acids by sequencing - chasing the same disease the whole time.
- His graduate-school Ras structures predate the company he now runs by roughly three decades. He was studying the molecular roots of cancer long before there was a business in diagnosing it.
- He holds an adjunct professorship in Molecular and Structural Biochemistry at NC State University while running a venture-backed startup.
- One of his former employers, Sirtris, was the buzzy longevity company built on resveratrol and the sirtuin enzymes - acquired by GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million.