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Chief Scientific Officer, Tyler Korman, PhD
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I'm excited to announce that I'm now CSO, Chief Scientific Officer of eXoZymes. This journey started over 20 years ago and it's now culminated through founding Invizyne, which then became eXoZymes, from Director of R&D to VP of Research to now as CSO, where I can really now help push through the strategy for how we become that leader in biomanufacturing. I started my career with an undergraduate degree in chemistry at UC San Diego. I followed that up with a master's degree in chemistry also from UCSD. I then went and got my PhD at UC Irvine. Through my PhD I had published at least five high profile papers from journals such as biochemistry all the way up through nature. I then moved from my postdoc to UCLA where I worked with Dr. Jim Bowie, where we pioneered this whole field of cell-free biocatalysis. Between the years of 2008 and 2019 when I left, we published numerous papers in Nature Communications, Nature Chemical Biology, just to name a few. During my time at eXoZymes, we've patented at least five different technologies and we also have in drafts a number of publications that describe some of the advancements that we've built here over the years. When I started off on my journey studying enzymes in graduate school, I knew I wanted to study enzymes from a more applied aspect and so figuring out how enzymes function in the context of natural product biosynthesis was really interesting. That was still really scientific. We were just studying the structure function and a relationship of enzymes involved in those pathways. When I moved to UCLA in 2008, it was specifically to figure out how we could apply enzymes to actually make things that people wanted. We initially started with a project to make biofuels using a single enzyme. This ended up changing into what eventually became Invizyne and now eXoZymes. We basically had that aha moment where we said, what if we just got rid of cells and reconstituted enzymatic pathways cell-free to enable us to make these complex natural products much easier and faster. That's basically how it translated in faster. That's basically how it translated in. I could rely on my decades of experience working with enzymes, engineering them to make that process faster. It's really been a really fun journey seeing how we started with long cascades of enzymes to turn sugars into flavors and fragrances to now engineering shorter pathways to make more interesting compounds that can be used as nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, pharmaceuticals, and I think the sky's the limit for this technology. I'm really excited about the future of biomanufacturing. I'm really excited about what the developments that we've pioneered allow us to unlock. From potential treatments for a variety of different diseases because we can now access new molecules, to being able to provide solutions for longevity, for metabolic health, for overall wellness. I think we stand at a crossroads where we need new solutions to be able to produce these important molecules and I think we have those solutions.