I’m the son of a chemist. I was born in Philadelphia but raised in Istanbul, where my dad was a chemistry professor and dean of the graduate school at Bosphorus University. I went to college at Bowdoin in Maine to study chemistry. Then my direction changed one day — I read a bulletin board posting about toxicology and cancer, something I knew nothing about, and I became obsessed with the topic. Enough to earn my Ph.D. in toxicology from MIT. and at this point my goal was to be an academic; I thought like a lot of my MIT classmates that the best of the best in science became academics while the rest went to work in some company lab they didn’t much like. So, I went to MIT for my graduate studies with that in mind.
During my graduate program, I was working on quantifying trace level analysis of DNA and protein adducts, which required the development of new hardware and methodologies. My lab was involved in all kinds of collaborations with the engineering departments, including building all sorts of analytical instrumentation. These machines would be the next turning point on my path.
After a brief 2-year stint as a lecturer at MIT I gave up the idea of an academic career and joined a startup called BioTrove as the 5th employee in 2000 as part of the team working to develop a high-throughput hardware platform for mass spectrometers. The goal of our work was to build a solution that significantly accelerated the pace of essential analysis compared to what could be done on conventional machines. Researchers wanted the results far faster, and at higher volumes, than what was possible with the technology available at the time. We built something that solved these challenges — a technology that would come to be commercially known as RapidFire.
RapidFire was eventually spun out as an independent operating company called Biocius Life Sciences, where I was COO and led operations up until it was acquired by Agilent in 2011.
After 2.5 years at Agilent, I left to start PureHoney Technologies, bootstrapping operations in late 2014 with two old colleagues from MIT and veterans of BioTrove and Biocius (Bill and Arrin, who are still with me today). PureHoney was initially built on a single offering — RapidFire screening services for pharma and biotech. But over the next eight years we grew the company into a full-scale bioanalytical CRO addressing the spectrum of analytical chemistry and high-throughput screening applications for our customers.
In early 2022, Pete reached out to me on LinkedIn and we got to know each other over the coming year. We ultimately shared a vision of what we could build together, and in early 2023, accepted growth capital from Care Equity to make that vision a reality.
We rebranded as Momentum Biotechnologies, invested in new technologies, and rapidly began developing proprietary capabilities. We now have clients all over the world, and because of our cutting-edge offering, we collaborate on some of the most exciting new drug modalities, like degraders and PROTACs, RNA targets, and molecular glues in addition to the analysis of preclinical samples.
Momentum is a very different place from the academic career I thought I’d have – a place I didn’t even know existed. So, I always tell aspiring scientists to keep an open mind and explore the various journeys that science can take you on. For me, it led to entrepreneurship and ultimately put me on an endless quest to commercialize new drug discovery solutions that make a positive impact on human health. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Can Ozbal is not an investor with Care Equity and is not being compensated for sharing his opinion about Care Equity or any member of the Care Equity team. Care Equity has invested in a company led by Can Ozbal, which creates a conflict of interest. Can Ozbal’s opinion may not be representative of any other person’s experience with Care Equity or any member of the Care Equity team.