About us

Our location

Precision BioTools was founded in 2023 in Branford, Connecticut by a team of experienced researchers. We are focused on meeting customer antibody needs through antigen and project design, antibody discovery and production using in vivo and in vitro methods for antibody discovery.

Our Facility

Our facility was expanded in 2024 and occupies 10,000 sq ft of combined lab and office space. Our laboratories are outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment and appropriate safeguards. Our new facility has expanded our capacity to develop and deliver custom antibodies to our customers

Our team

Leadership

Michael Weiner

Dr. Weiner is a serial scientific entrepreneur and the Founder of Abbratech Inc.

Michael P. Weiner, Ph.D. obtained his undergraduate and graduate training at Penn State Univ. (Microbiology) and Cornell Univ. (Genetics, with minors in both Biochemistry and Microbiology), respectively. His graduate research involved cloning DNA methylation enzymes from various Bacillus species. He was the first to clone and sequence M.BamHI. He did post-doc training in the Dept of Phys Chem at Cornell Univ., where he synthesized the genes for RNaseA and thrombin, and investigated the in vitro folding behavior of both of these proteins. A few of his major scientific accomplishments include inventing and commercializing; (i) Quikchange site-directed mutagenesis, (ii) 454 Next generation DNA sequencing and emulsion PCR, and (iii) bead-based genotyping. His additional inventions include: (i) digital PCR, (ii) biopanning using emulsions, (iii) emulsion-based DNA sequencing, and (iv) FAC sorting virus particles.

Dr. Weiner has spent 6 years at GlaxoSmithKline as Head of the Dept of Genomic Sciences, where he invented the use of barcoding Luminex beads for HT-genotyping, and methods for an automated HT-yeast two-hybrid screening assay. He has co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed articles, over 50 U.S. patent and patent applications, and has edited 3 books in his areas of expertise: (1) Cloning and expression vectors for gene function analysis (Eaton Publishing), (2) Gene cloning and expression technologies (BioTechniques Press), and (3) Genetic Variation: a lab manual (Cold Spring Harbor Lab Press).

Dr Weiner is a serial scientific entrepreneur, having either founded or been one of the first scientists at several biotechnology companies, including: RainDance Technologies, 454 Life Sciences, Affomix, AxioMx, GnuBio and Encodia. He has received the Connecticut Entrepreneur of the year (2016) and the Citetab Lifetime Achievement (2019) awards.

Greg Mirando

Greg has over a decade of experience in affinity maturation, antibody production and custom project management

With over 10 years of experience in antibody discovery and engineering, Greg’s expertise is in developing novel solutions for challenging targets. Previously, he led teams specializing in B-cell cloning, hybridoma, and phage display platforms, playing a key role in advancing antibody engineering techniques. His experience also extends to project management, where he successfully oversaw customer projects with tailored antibody solutions for each client.

Looking forward, Greg is focused on expanding Precision BioTools’ capabilities to support customers in discovering antibodies for targets that are difficult to address. Under his leadership, the company continues to innovate and push the boundaries of antibody discovery.

Outside of his professional work, Greg is actively involved in his community as the Information Director for Rocky Hill Little League and a soccer coach for the Rocky Hill Soccer Club where he enjoys helping young athletes develop both their skills and character.

Mary Ferguson

Mary has over decade of experience at biotech startups including assay development, antibody discovery and validation

Mary received her graduate training at Thomas Jefferson University (Biomedical Sciences). Her research focused on biophysical consequences of RNA editing in voltage gated potassium channels using patch clamp. Mary first gained industry experience at Merck where she focused on cell based assays in vaccine product testing and supported neuroscience drug discovery.

Mary then shifted to small biotech at Knopp Biosciences where she evaluated the effects of novel compounds on voltage gated potassium channel function in an effort to discover new epilepsy treatments. This research supported a patent application for using a novel class of compounds to activate Kv7 channels.

At Abcam, Mary entered the antibody discovery field: developing antibodies which modulate protein function including GPCRs and helping to develop the Epivolve(R) platform to identify site specific antibodies as well as expanding the breadth of antibody validation using surrogate protein Western blot and ELISA

Board of Directors

Michael Weiner

Dr. Weiner is a serial scientific entrepreneur and the Founder of Abbratech Inc.

Michael Egholm, Ph.D.

Dr. Egholm brings more than 27 years of proven leadership in developing and commercializing innovative technologies.

Michael Egholm, Ph.D., brings more than 27 years of proven leadership in developing and commercializing innovative technologies. Most recently Dr. Egholm serves as Chief Executive Officer and President of Standard BioTools.

Dr. Egholm, served as Chief Technology Officer at Danaher Life Sciences a platform of Danaher Corporation. He served as President of Biopharmaceuticals and the Chief Technology Officer, at Pall Corporation. He served as Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Research & Development at 454 Life Sciences Corporation, a center of excellence at Roche Applied Science. At Roche, he spearheaded several large high-profile programs including the Neanderthal Sequencing project and the sequencing of the first individual human genome.

Sean Mackay

Sean Mackay co-founded and leads IsoPlexis as CEO. IsoPlexis’ mission is to provide widely accessible cellular proteomics to speed personalized, curative medicines.

Sean Mackay co-founded and leads IsoPlexis as CEO. IsoPlexis’ mission is to provide widely accessible cellular proteomics to speed personalized, curative medicines. The company focuses on shifting paradigms in cell and gene therapy, cancer immunology, and infectious disease towards more patient specific, long lasting treatments. IsoPlexis’ easy to use instrumentation and software have won numerous awards and are used globally to advance precision medicine.

Previously, Sean helped incubate Kleiner Perkins-backed Lifesquare, which connected patients, payers, and providers through sharing essential healthcare information. Additionally, through work at Lazard and with several early-stage ventures, he developed a passion for helping life sciences and medical device companies manage in times of strategic change, to deliver their highly needed products to the clinical ecosystem. Sean has co-authored a number of publications centered around immune medicines and holds patents for a number of single-cell products worldwide.

Sean Cassidy

Mr. Cassidy is the Chief Financial Officer of Arvinas with over 20 years of experience in the life sciences industry

Mr. Cassidy is the Chief Financial Officer of Arvinas. He has over 20 years of experience in the life sciences industry, including serving as Chief Financial Officer of Axerion Therapeutics, a preclinical biotechnology company developing therapies for neurological diseases and injuries; Chief Financial Officer of CuraGen Corporation (NASDAQ: CRGN), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company; and Director and Controller of 454 Life Sciences Corporation, a life sciences company that developed and commercialized next generation DNA sequencing instruments and reagents.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Cassidy served at Deloitte, one of the big four public accounting firms with a broad base of clients in the healthcare space. Mr. Cassidy is currently a board member of ReNetX Bio and of the Friends of Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital, a nonprofit organization that helps improve the health and well-being of pediatric patients and their families.

Mr. Cassidy holds a B.S. from the University of Connecticut and is a Certified Public Accountant in the State of Connecticut.

Kenan Turnacioglu, Ph.D.

Dr. Turnacioglu is currently Chairperson of PaigeAI, a machine learning Pathology company spun out of Memorial Sloan Kettering

Dr. Turnacioglu is currently Chairperson of PaigeAI a machine learning Pathology company spun out of Memorial Sloan Kettering. He also serves on the board of Immunai a biotech company working on mapping and reprogramming the immune system. In 2022, he joined the board of MassiveBio, a company deploying AI to match cancer patients with clinical trials.

In 2011, Dr. Turnacioglu co-founded PointState Capital LP and managed the Portfolios and investment teams in Healthcare and Consumer sectors before departing in 2018. From 2001 to 2010, he worked at Duquesne Capital Management LLC managing Healthcare investments. While at these positions he also served on the board of StemCentrx (2013-2016), Agensys (2004-2007), and NYU Langone Cancer Center (2010-2015). From 1998-2000, he worked at Credit Suisse as an analyst on the biotech team.

Dr. Turnacioglu earned a B.A. from Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania, before completing two years of a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. He currently resides in Manhattan with his wife, Kristin, and four kids.

Medical Advisory Board

John Hastewell, DPhil

John Hastewell served in many roles in his nearly 30 years at Novartis.

John Hastewell served in many roles in his nearly 30 years at Novartis. Most recently, he was the Head of Biologics, responsible for the discovery of antibody, protein, and nucleic acid-based therapeutics. Previously as Global Head of the Program Office he worked on research strategy and portfolio management and oversaw the company’s strategic focus on building their biologics drug pipeline. He also served in several leadership roles at Novartis based in the UK, including Head of Thrombosis Research and leading the Immunology Platform, which coordinated research opportunities across all disease areas. He obtained his BA degree in biochemistry from Oxford and his DPhil from University of York in the UK.

Robert Hollingsworth, Ph.D.

Dr. Hollingsworth is the Chief Scientific Officer at Shoreline Biosciences.

Dr. Hollingsworth is the Chief Scientific Officer at Shoreline Biosciences. He oversees the research and development of Shoreline’s novel, best-in-class iPSC-derived immune cell therapies for cancer, including a pipeline of over ten programs. These programs include CAR-directed natural killer cells and macrophage, and have the potential to dramatically increase the accessibility and efficacy of immune cell therapies.

Dr. Hollingsworth has been successfully developing new cancer medicines using cutting edge technologies for over 25 years and contributed to several approved drugs. Prior to joining Shoreline, he served as the Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer for Cancer Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics at Pfizer where he and his team advanced five novel immuno-oncology therapies into clinical development. He also previously led cancer drug discovery at MedImmune to create antibody-based drugs and served as Head of the Oncology Therapeutic Area Team at GlaxoSmithKline where he conducted cancer genetics research and contributed to the development of several small molecule cancer medicines.

Dr. Hollingsworth studied biology and physics as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a Ph.D. in biochemistry, biophysics, and genetics from the University of Colorado. His post-doctoral studies elucidated the connections between cell cycle control and the function of tumor suppressor proteins.

Dr. Hollingsworth’s scientific expertise is broad and includes immuno-oncology, multiple therapeutic modalities, advanced technologies, and all phases of drug development. He has served as an adjunct assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, been an invited speaker and chair at numerous conferences, and received several prestigious awards. He has published many papers in top journals, including Nature, Science, and Cancer Research, and co-authored a seminal paper on the contribution of microenvironment factors to tumorigenesis that was named one of the top “milestones in cancer research” by Nature.

Rachel Humphrey, M.D

Dr. Humphrey is the President and CEO of an Immuno-oncology start-up.

Dr. Humphrey is a medical oncologist with over 25 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. She is currently President and CEO of an Immuno-oncology start-up. She is also currently a member of the Board of Directors at Sporos Biosciences, and formerly an independent member of the Board of Directors of Xilio and CytomX Therapeutics, respectively. Over the course of her career, she’s served as Chief Medical Officer in biotechnology companies, including Black Diamond Therapeutics, CytomX therapeutics and Mirati Therapeutics. She’s also held numerous senior leadership roles in large pharmaceutical companies including SVP and Head of Immuno-Oncology at AstraZeneca, and VP, Clinical Development and Immuno-oncology at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) where she supervised the development of ipilimumab (Yervoy) from early development to post-launch and founded/chaired the first Immuno-oncology working group. Dr. Humphrey holds an M.D. from Case Western Reserve University and a B.A. from Harvard University. She received her training in internal medicine at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and started her career as an oncology fellow and staff physician at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD.

Ulf Landegren, M.D., Ph.D

Ulf Landegren received his MD and PhD in Uppsala, Sweden, before spending five years at California Institute of Technology

Ulf Landegren received his MD and PhD in Uppsala, Sweden, before spending five years at California Institute of Technology. As professor of molecular medicine in Uppsala his research focuses on developing molecular tools to meet medical needs, from analyses of genetic variation with techniques such as oligonucleotide ligation assays and padlock probes to protein assays using oligonucleotide-conjugated antibodies in proximity assays for measuring protein expression levels in liquid samples or imaging their distribution in situ.

Professor Landegren is a member of EMBO, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Sciences at Uppsala. He is a member of several academic or industrial boards and advisory boards. He has authored 224 peer-reviewed publications, and he is inventor of 49 patents or applications. Work in his lab has so far given rise to 12 spin-out companies with a combined staff of more than 700 people, including two companies that are now publicly traded (Olink Proteomics and Q-linea). Technologies from his lab have been licensed to many leading international biotech and diagnostic companies.

Technical Advisory Board

Michael P. Snyder, Ph.D.

Michael Snyder is the Stanford Ascherman Professor, Chair of Genetics, and Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine.

Michael Snyder is the Stanford Ascherman Professor and Chair of Genetics and the Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Dr. Snyder received his Ph.D. training at the California Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He is a leader in the field of functional genomics and multiomics, and one of the major participants of the ENCODE project. His laboratory study was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism and has developed many technologies in genomics and proteomics. These including the development of proteome chips, high resolution tiling arrays for the entire human genome, methods for global mapping of transcription factor (TF) binding sites (ChIP-chip now replaced by ChIP-seq), paired end sequencing for mapping of structural variation in eukaryotes, de novo genome sequencing of genomes using high throughput technologies and RNA-Seq. These technologies have been used for characterizing genomes, proteomes and regulatory networks.

Seminal findings from the Snyder laboratory include the discovery that much more of the human genome is transcribed and contains regulatory information than was previously appreciated (e.g. lncRNAs and TF binding sites), and a high diversity of transcription factor binding occurs both between and within species. He launched the field of personalized medicine by combining different state-of–the-art “omics” technologies to perform the first longitudinal detailed integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) of a person, and his laboratory pioneered the use of wearables technologies (smart watches and continuous glucose monitoring) for precision health. He is a cofounder of many biotechnology companies, including Personalis, Affomix, SensOmics, Qbio, January, Protos, Oralome, Mirvie and Filtricine.

Dieter Söll, Ph.D.

Dieter Gerhard Söll is a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Chemistry at the Yale University.

Dieter Gerhard Söll is a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Chemistry at the Yale University. He earned his B.S. and Ph.D. from Stuttgart University in 1962 and did his postdoctoral work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1962-1965 with Har Gobind Khorana. He was briefly an assistant professor at University of Wisconsin before joining the Yale faculty in 1967 and has been there since. He was named a Sterling Professor in 2006.

As a postdoc with Jack Strominger, he identified tRNAs that were involved in peptidoglycan formation leading to the discovery of novel aminoacyl-tRNA functions. He later sequenced the selenocysteine tRNA. His research is centered on the formation of aminoacyl-tRNA and tRNA synthetases. He is a member of the National Academy of Science, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1972 and 1989 and a Humboldt Fellow in 2000.

In addition to his academic work, he has been recognized as a leader in creating research opportunities for minority students at Yale University for summer research in the early 1970s.

David Weitz, Ph.D.

David A. Weitz is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University.

David A. Weitz is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University, where he has an appointment in both the Physics Department and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He received his B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Waterloo, and his PhD in Physics from Harvard. He leads the experimental soft condensed matter physics research group.

His research efforts include soft matter physics, biophysics and biotechnology. He is Director of Harvard’s NSF-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, and co-Director of the BASF Advanced Research Initiative. Dr Weitz is also a co-founder of Raindance Technologies, GnuBio, Capsum, HiFiBio, BioMillenia, 1Cell-Bio, Spherebio, NextGen Forensic Sciences, TCRx and Dragon Drop Inn.

In addition, he is a celebrated member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States.