RainDance Attracts Top-Tier Commercial Leadership to Accelerate Global Growth

Industry veterans Jay Therrien, Ph.D., Roger Schaller, and Yafei Liu, Ph.D. have joined the company to further accelerate growth in the Digital PCR and Targeted Sequencing product areas. These hires complement the company’s global expansion of its service and support operations which are focused on enhancing the experience of its customers and accelerating customer adoption.

In April, RainDance announced the closing of a $20 million Series E financing as well as a multi-year commercial supply agreement with Myriad Genetics, which has adopted RainDance’s ThunderStorm™ system for its myRisk™ hereditary cancer panel. Last week, Myriad announced its plan to convert the hereditary cancer market by transitioning a significant share of their leading tests to myRisk by the summer of 2015. Initially the test will provide pan-cancer screening for breast, colon, ovarian, endometrial, pancreatic and melanoma – and in the future, lung, prostate, and all cancers.

“This is a breakthrough year for RainDance with recent successes in sequencing and the launch of the RainDrop™ digital PCR system positioning us to continue doubling sales annually for the next several years,” said Andy Watson, Chief Commercial Officer at RainDance. “We are thrilled to add the caliber and depth of sales experience that Jay, Roger and Yafei bring to driving adoption of disruptive genomic technologies. They will be instrumental in realizing our vision of transforming the early detection and screening of cancer and other inherited diseases.”

Jay Therrien, Ph.D., joins RainDance as Vice President of Worldwide Sales. He was previously Senior Vice President of Global Sales at Knome. Prior to Knome, Therrien was Vice President, Commercial Operations, Sequencing at Life Technologies, where he directed sales and support activities for Sanger capillary electrophoresis (CE), SOLiD™, and Ion Torrent sequencing franchises. He previously held sales leadership roles at Illumina including Director of Sales for the Asia-Pacific region and Japan. He has a B.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas.

Roger Schaller joins RainDance as Business Leader of Next-Generation Sequencing. He comes from Affymetrix, where he was Senior Director of Business Development for the Molecular Diagnostics business managing global partnerships in the “Powered by Affymetrix™” program. Previously, Schaller was Director of North American Sales and Marketing at Cepheid, where he was responsible for sales and market development, as well as building the company’s commercial teams. Schaller has also held business development, sales and marketing positions at Dade-Behring. He has a B.S. in medical technology and biology from Illinois State University.

Yafei Liu, Ph.D., joins as Head of Commercial Operations for the Asia-Pacific region. Prior to RainDance, Liu was responsible for Life Technologies’ China sales team selling digital PCR, sequencing, and quantitative PCR products. Liu also worked at Applied Biosystems for several years on the qPCR R&D team. Liu is based in Beijing.

“RainDance has built leading franchises in digital PCR and targeted sequencing that rival any other in innovative impact on research and translational medicine,” said Therrien. “We are all delighted to be joining this world-class team at a time when RainDance is experiencing a major inflection point in growth and customer adoption.”