 When he was just 26, bioengineer Christophe Schilling won a small-business grant from the National Science Foundation. His plan was to reengineer the genomes of microorganisms such as bacteria and yeast, which are used as living chemical factories, to produce new or better products. With his university mentor, Bernhard Palsson, Schilling raised $3 million to launch Genomatica in San Diego in 2000.
Today, the company is attracting partners such as Dow Chemical that want to engineer microbes to churn out chemicals used to make everything from drugs to soaps. Although that goal is not unique, Genomatica’s tool is: software dubbed SimPheny that decodes a microorganism’s genome data into a “pars list” of molecular components and enables the construction of computer models of the microbe’s metabolism. Corporate clients can then tap the models to predict a particular organism’s industrial potential. In November 1998, Dr. Schilling co-founded Genomatica Inc. with the bold vision of using modeling and simulation technology to transform the ways in which organisms are engineered and drug are discovered. Today Genomaticais one of the leading Systems Biology companies providing modeling solutions to both commercial and academic settings for a wide array of problems across both medical and industrial biotechnology. Genomaticahas a number of major corporate partnerships with leading chemical and biotechnology companies and has been awarded numerous government grants, including two Phase II SBIRs recently granted by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy.
In 2000, Dr. Schilling received his doctoral degree from the Bioengineering Department at the University of California, San Diego, during which time he was a Whitaker Foundation Fellow, and also holds a bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University where he was a Howard Hughes Undergraduate Research Fellow. He is the chief scientific architect of the company's flagship modeling platform, SimPheny(TM), and the driving force behind the company's strategic business plan and commercialization efforts that have generated over seven million dollars in both equity financing and revenue since the Company's inception. He is a co-author of a number of scientific articles in the area of systems biology and metabolic engineering, and an inventor on a number of patent filings surrounding the Company's core technologies. In February 2001, he was named as one of 16 young 'up and comers' in the field of Genomics by Genome Technology. Currently, he is also the principal investigator for a number of federal research grants from both the NIH and DOE. About Genomatica
 Genomaticais a leading innovator of biological modeling and simulation technologies transforming biological research and the way organisms are engineered and drugs are discovered. Genomaticas proprietary SimPhenyTM modeling platform enables the rapid generation of cellular-level models of biological systems focused on metabolism. With an established and growing collection of organism specific models, this fully integrated technology is designed to accelerate biological discovery by rapidly generating comprehensive information about genes, proteins, and biological pathways, along with information on the expression, regulation, and potential products that affect these biological systems. Genomaticais currently pursuing commercial relationships with major bioprocessing, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies seeking to leverage the power of model-driven systems biology for rapid discovery.
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