Dr. Mark Kotter
Founder and CEO, bit.bio
Mark R Kotter is a doctor, scientist, and entrepreneur dedicated to transitioning biology to engineering for the benefit of patients. Born in Canada, he studied medicine in Graz, earned his PhD in Cambridge, and trained as a neurosurgeon in Vienna, Toronto, and Cambridge, where he currently practises. Outside of his contributions as a surgeon, Dr Kotter is best known for discovering the importance of immune cells (macrophages) for the regeneration of myelin sheaths in the brain, and for developing opti-ox, a gene targeting approach that enables faithful execution of genetic information in cells. Applied to cellular reprogramming, a synthetic biology/engineering approach for changing the identity of cells, the technology is capable of producing any human cell within days. To leverage the technology and pursue his moonshot goal of developing a scalable technology platform capable of producing consistent batches of every human cell for use in research, drug discovery, and cell therapy, Dr Kotter turned into an entrepreneur and started bit.bio.
Rethinking Developmental Biology With Cellular Reprogramming
