I was born in Brazil and grew up in Uruguay before moving to Amsterdam when I was 7. When I was 9, my mother’s friend gave me a tour of the Pasteur Institute, where I would later return as an intern. This experience sparked my interest in exploring the minutia of biology. I got hooked on the DNA and protein chemistry chapters of my biology textbook in high school, and I majored in Systems Biology and subsequently pursued a Masters. Here is where I became enthralled with the magic of stem cells. I emailed labs around the world soliciting an internship opportunity in cell reprogramming and was invited to spend half a year at Mount Sinai in New York City, where I ended up spending a full year working on stem cell biology.
My work at Mount Sinai subsequently led me to me back to the Netherlands to pursue my PhD in stem cell biology and systems biology. I had heard about a “famous systems biology MIT guy starting a stem cell lab in Holland” (the Van Oudenaarden Lab), so I reached out, was invited over, and I began my PhD program in 2012. The initial mission of the lab was to explore if single-cell sequencing was feasible. While it was, the work was slow and tedious to start – my PhD project involved manual pipetting for a year to generate a 3,000-cell dataset. I was able to identify novel sub-populations and uncover promising new signals, leading me to undertake the work of automating a novel, scalable single-cell sequencing protocol that we published in 2016 as SORT-seq: a robotized cel-seq method that would become the foundational service offering of Single Cell Discoveries.
In 2015, I came to share an office with Judith Vivie, who was the new operations lead of the single-cell sequencing core facility after having done an internship in the same lab. The lab was one of the first to make single-cell innovations accessible to academic clients, and demand was outpacing our bandwidth. This pain point would turn out to be the foundation of Single Cell Discoveries — Judith and I began spinning out our technology into an independent business to service the customer demand and execute on a greater vision that we both shared: solving the problems of single-cell biology with technology and data, at scale and for clients across the life sciences: from academia to biopharma. After I completed my PhD in 2018, we spun out Single Cell Discoveries in the same year and bootstrapped our operations.
After ~3 years of growing independently, we met Pete and Cynthia at Care Equity in the fall of 2021. We got to know each other over the months and felt that we shared a vision for a purpose-built single-cell sequencing CRO that could operate at scale and ultimately help our customers bring single-cell technology into the clinic. But to do this would require capital. We accepted investment from Care Equity in June 2022 and have subsequently developed a one-of-a-kind high-capacity single-cell sequencing lab in Utrecht city center to bring our proprietary methods to biopharma customers globally.
Mauro Muraro 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 Mauro Muraro, which creates a conflict of interest. Mauro Muraro’s opinion may not be representative of any other person’s experience with Care Equity or any member of the Care Equity team.