Taking It From Lab To Market: LJCDS Students Meet Biomatrica Exec

Editor's Note: La Jolla Country Day School released this announcement on Feb. 28, 2012.

Head of School Chris Schuck Tuesday kicked off the Second Annual Entrepreneurial Leadership Series by welcoming a scientist who started out as a tree planter and has ended up as a bio-tech executive changing the world's way of preserving DNA and RNA samples.

Judy Muller-Cohn, founder and chief executive officer, of San Diego based Biomatrica, met with a group of Upper School students and outlined the route she and her scientist husband, Rolf, took in developing a company that mimicked the chemistry of an insect to develop ways to preserve DNA/RNA at room temperature.

Prior to Biomatrica's revolutionary work, laboratories across the world have had to maintain freezers to preserve DNA and RNA gathered for scientific studies or crime scene analysis. That hampered science in developing countries and made the use of DNA expensive and at the mercy of power outages. Muller-Cohn, however, took the students step-by-step through the scientific breakthroughs she and her husband achieved and then through the challenges they faced in creating a company based on that work.

Muller-Cohn also shared with the students how she and her husband were able to pursue this engrossing work, while managing doctoral studies and the raising of four children.

"Life is a juggle for me,'' Muller-Cohn said. "My life has never been boring; sometimes it is exhausting.''

Biomatrica was founded in 2004 in San Diego, which Muller-Cohn considers an easier place to create a company because of the collegial nature of the city's bio-tech industry. The company was based on the chemistry the Muller-Cohn's had observed in a common Tardigrade (photo right), a microscopic, crablike creature that was able to survive for decades in a hibernation-like state only to be brought back to life by water.

Mimicking the insect's chemistry, she explained, gave the Muller-Cohn's a technique that could be applied to preserving DNA/RNA samples at room temperature. Once the science was proven, the business challenges loomed.

Seeking venture capital, hiring executives, training a sales force and developing the commercial products followed, all of which was a challenge for two scientists who didn't see themselves as the business entrepreneurs they were becoming.

Today, Biomatrica's DNA trays, filled with preserving re-agents, are being adopted in laboratories and police departments all over the world.

"Not every start-up makes it through all these steps to profitability,'' Muller-Cohn said. "I'm happy to say it looks like we will be one of the successful ones.''

Muller-Cohn, who lives in Del Mar, had one characteristic that has been common to all the entrepreneurs who have spoken in Schuck's Leadership series: she is driven by passion for the work, not the riches that come with the success.

Throughout her career, Muller-Cohn said, she insisted that every project she pursued – including her tree planting days – would hold out some benefit for the environment. Obviating the need for a "cold chain'' to conduct research on DNA and RNA greatly reduces the power it takes to maintain freezing environments and opens up the developing world to this research, she said.

Today Muller-Cohn spends more of her time on business than science. After struggling with some early executive hires, she decided to run the business operations herself. Her husband, Rolf, the company's chief scientific officer, leads the science operations.

"I love the science,'' she said. "But Rolf is a better scientist, very elegant, creative. When it came time to figure out who was going to get this company off the ground, I was the last man standing. I run my household on a spread sheet. It was natural.''

Muller-Cohn also had come from a family of entrepreneurs, though the family's expertise had been in banking. "I wanted to do something in science,'' she said.

That she has.