Michael Chiu is the CEO of Kytopen, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech spun out of an MIT lab that builds the Flowfect platform - a non-viral, continuous-flow way to shuttle DNA, mRNA and CRISPR payloads into living cells at manufacturing scale. A mechanical engineer with a PhD and MBA from MIT, Chiu has spent his career turning laboratory hardware into shipped products, founding and selling companies in energy harvesting, healthcare, and bioprocessing before taking Kytopen's helm in August 2023 to push cell therapy manufacturing out of the bottleneck.
Ryan Swoboda is the co-founder and CEO of NAVAN Technologies, a San Carlos, California biotech commercializing NanoStraw, a non-viral platform that pokes microscopic hollow tubes into living cells to deliver DNA, mRNA, and proteins without killing them. He spun the technology out of Stanford's Melosh Group in 2017 while finishing his graduate research, holds inventor status on early NanoStraw patents, and ran the company's NSF STTR Phase II grant before becoming CEO in 2019. A first-generation college graduate, he splits his energy between scaling a deep-tech delivery platform for cell and gene therapy and running science demos for low-income kids.
Kytopen is a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech and MIT spinout building Flowfect, a non-viral, continuous-flow platform that uses fluid flow plus electric fields to deliver mRNA, DNA and CRISPR payloads into cells. The technology aims to engineer hundreds of billions of cells in minutes, removing a major bottleneck in discovering, developing and manufacturing advanced cell therapies like CAR-T and NK-cell treatments.