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.
