wyss-institute
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Feng Xuan
Feng Xuan is a Boston-based scientist-entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Spear Bio, a biotechnology company building ultra-sensitive immunoassays for protein research and early disease diagnostics. He invented the company's core SPEAR (Successive Proximity Extension Amplification Reaction) technology as a Technology Development Fellow at Harvard's Wyss Institute, translating a decade of research in molecular and immuno-diagnostics into a platform that can measure minute quantities of protein biomarkers from sub-microliter samples. Under his leadership, Spear Bio raised an oversubscribed $45 million Series A in 2024 and earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for a blood-based pTau 217 test aimed at early Alzheimer's disease detection.
Richard Novak
Richard Novak is a bioengineer and entrepreneur who co-founded and leads Unravel Biosciences, a rare disease therapeutics company built on its BioNAV platform that uses RNA network analysis to ask whether a drug will help real patients before working backward to find its target. A former lead engineer at Harvard's Wyss Institute with 15+ years in drug discovery systems, he also founded the swab company Rhinostics during the COVID-19 pandemic and the science-education nonprofit Future Scientist. Novak holds a PhD in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley and a BS in Biology from Emory, and is a 2024 Termeer Fellow.
Shannon Nangle
Shannon Nangle is a microbe-wrangling scientist turned CEO who co-founded Circe Bioscience to make fats, oils, and even chocolate out of thin air. Her company feeds carbon dioxide, water, and electricity to engineered microbes that grow like plants and excrete valuable molecules, producing food and industrial ingredients in a carbon-negative way. Spun out of Harvard's Wyss Institute in 2021, Circe made what it calls the world's first gas-fermentation-derived chocolate and has raised over $17 million to scale a manufacturing process Nangle spent six years building.