Ginkgo Bioworks, the leading horizontal platform for cell programming announced that Behzad Mahdavi, Ph.D., MBA, has joined as senior vice president of biopharma manufacturing and life sciences tools. In this new role, Dr. Mahdavi will lead Ginkgo's commercial efforts in the growing areas of bio-reagents, cell and gene therapies and new biopharmaceutical modalities. Dr. Mahdavi brings more than 20 years of experience in developing and leading innovative patient-centric growth strategies in challenging environments in the biopharmaceutical, cell and gene therapy, personalized medicine and life sciences sectors.
Prior to joining Ginkgo, Dr. Mahdavi most recently served as vice president of global open innovation at Catalent Pharma Solutions, where he created a distinctive portfolio of innovative services and expanded its customer base in new market segments. Prior to his work at Catalent, he held numerous leadership positions during his 13 years at Lonza and served as CEO of SAM Electron Technologies. Throughout his career, Dr. Mahdavi has built expertise in defining and developing optimal growth strategies and actionable business plans across biologics, cell therapy, and viral pharmaceutical modalities. In addition to his company leadership roles, he has also served in multiple Board of Directors and Advisory Board roles. Dr. Mahdavi holds a Doctorate in Chemistry from the University of Sherbrooke, Canada, and also has a Master in Business Administration from the University of Quebec in Montreal.
Ginkgo has significant experience in the design of custom organisms and the discovery of novel enzymes that bring new biopharma products to life. Ginkgo's robust codebase and ability to search and screen candidates in high throughput allows it to support programs across all aspects of biopharma manufacturing and discovery. Ginkgo's projects in this space span its expertise with both microbial and mammalian cells, and include publicly announced collaborations with Antheia, Aldevron, Biogen, Microba, Moderna, Novo
Nordisk, Optimvia, Persephone, SaponiQx, Selecta Biosciences, Synlogic, Tantu, Totient, and Roche, as well as additional programs at various stages in the pipeline. With its strong enzyme discovery, optimization and metabolic engineering capabilities, Ginkgo hopes to enable the creation of new products and to improve product development across all therapeutic modalities.
"Ginkgo is integrating capabilities at massive scale in genetic engineering, manufacturing process optimization and bioinformatics along with innovative technologies from third-party developers," said Dr. Mahdavi. "There are a tremendous number of opportunities in this space, and I joined Ginkgo because I believe this company is the partner of choice that the industry needs to realize those boundless opportunities. I am thrilled to work alongside Ginkgo's world-class team to help create a platform of choice for our partners, who strive to benefit patients around the world."
"Dr. Mahdavi brings outstanding experience in global business growth, expansion and commercial innovation, which will be instrumental as we aim to redefine the landscape of treating diseases," said Jennifer Wipf, senior vice president of commercial cell engineering at Ginkgo Bioworks. "We've proven how much our platform can help newcomers and incumbents in the growing biopharma space. As we continue to evolve our horizontal platform applications, having Dr. Mahdavi on our team will strengthen our ability to deliver innovative services to our customers and we can't wait to onboard more programs in the coming months and years."
Source: Ginkgo Bioworks
