Interview with Amy Liao, Co-founder and President of Genewiz
Amy Liao is currently the president of Genewiz, a company focused on providing support and R&D in the genomics field. After starting Genewiz with her husband in 1999, Liao built Genewiz to a major figure in the genomics field, with laboratories around the globe. In 2018, Genewiz was acquired by Brooks Life Sciences, and Liao was named president of Genewiz under the new ownership.
Rana Myneni: Genewiz is known for DNA sequencing, gene synthesis, and molecular biology. How is your company innovating and developing new tech to expand your research in this field?
Amy Liao: We always look at the market through the customer’s point of view. One thing that I think all successful companies do, or they have to put a focus on, is to be able to identify the needs from the customers. Their pains, what their pinpoints are, and then working on a solution to resolve those pains, to meet those needs. So for us, this is a continuous process. We have customer facing people who really work with customer demands, customer pinpoints in the frontmost center of their interactions with customers. Whenever they collect them, they hear this pain, they hear that demand. “Collect” this is what we call customer insight and then we will take that as a source of information for our next innovation. One example is cell and gene therapy. Right now, it is becoming the new frontier for precision medicine because you can not be more precise than inserting a gene to a patient that will be cured, not just treated with gene therapy, but the goal is a complete cure. What we sell with gene therapy, there are a lot of new demands that can not be met with the existing technology, so without getting to technical information, our team worked out a new method that can sequence through this plasmid. It is called AAV, Adeno-Associated Virus and this is a vehicle that people use to deliver the correct genes to patients. There is a lot of complexity with this factor for sequencing or for plasmid prep to retain the entirety of the plasmid. There is a lot of pinpoints throughout that process and our team innovated new methodologies to overcome all of those. So this is one example.
RM: One of Genewiz’s goals as mentioned in the mission statement is to create a greener environment. So how is Genewiz’s team taking an approach to be more sustainable.
AL: With this, we actually do this with two fronts. One of these is our old practice. For example, in Genewiz, we did away with disposable cups. The next part might be different because of Covid. We did away with all these plastic cups and plates, we put in a dishwasher to do away with a lot of those garbage, but as I said with Covid, we might want to reconsider at least doing the dishwasher for those real plates and real utensils. But, this can still serve as an example of being conscious of the environment and not creating a lot of garbage unnecessarily. And our cars that we use for our company for career service use hybrid vehicles to avoid using a lot of fossil fuels. So some of this is what we do and in terms of what we support our customers to do, our customers include a lot of alternative field companies. They are companies that work on being less dependent on fossil fuels, to work on alternative methods to get energy like algae or other organisms as an example. And sustainable agriculture, (I think you asked about agriculture too in a later question, maybe this can be combined together) a lot of agriculture companies use genetic engineering or molecular biology or sequencing to help them search for seeds that have the best future. They would consume less water and be pest-resistant so they don’t have to use pesticides. So there are a lot of things that companies like us can help agricultural companies to do to get more abundant food supply and use less energy less natural resources and less chemical intervention.
RM: Our next question is pretty broad, but can you talk generally about how Genewiz aids in biological research and what that process is like when working with clients?
AL: So we are an integral part of this value chain for everything related to biology, biological research, discovery, and development. Some services we provide are gene reading, gene writing, ripe genes, and genes allocating which is a newer technology. All people who do biological research or do agricultural research, if they touch upon and use molecular biology as part of their tool, they would need Genewiz to read their genes, write their genes, and produce their genes. So we are an extension of their lab and a lot of things that we do require a lot of pretty specialized expertise and heavy investment in capital. Take Lawrenceville, I know you have a research program as some people researched Genewiz in the past. For a lab to be, if they don't have access to a company like Genewiz, that they would need to have to have all those machines that would require an investment of millions of dollars in capital equipment that they probably don’t use that much, and have to hire people to run them, and have space to run them and house them. So all this model of us being the central service provider. Providing the speed, the quality, the specialized expertise to people. So this is how we make the research for people faster, better quality, and more cost efficient.
RM: Genewiz is currently operating on a really global scale with labs across the U.S, China, Japan, and the United kingdom. So how do you plan to continue to grow Genewiz especially under the new ownership of Brookslife.
AL: Not much difference. We will continue to grow based on where the market demand is and what new technologies and new research areas that we can support. So Brookslife bought us for exactly the same reason Genewiz has been growing because playing a very instrumental role in life science community. So this ownership doesn’t make any differences in that.
RM: Genewiz is very involved with different fields. For example cancer research, dna sequencing. Obviously one of the major scientific focuses right now is Covid-19 and the cure for that. So can you please share with us how Genewiz has been involved with that?
AL: We actually did quite a bit in this area. Back in January, when Covid was just identified as a new virus from China, the full sequence was completed in early January and as soon as CDC got hold of the sequence, they came to Genewiz asking us to synthesize the gene that codes for the spike protein of Covid. That was a super rushed process as they wanted to get that gene to make a move to the next step of vaccine development. So Genewiz the first company CDC came to when they got that sequence. And WHO also asked us to synthesize fragments of the covid genome and those fragments are used as a positive control in their decapsulation. So I would say a lot of the possible Covid testing capabilities that are out there that people are currently using have a lot of Genewiz contribution in it. And this not including a lot of those more research into what kind of people, what kind of genotype would subject people more to Covid. So there are a lot of sequencing efforts going on too. At Genewiz, we already did over a thousand projects for customers who are involved with Covid. Either it is vaccine development, testing, or research.
RM: You’re the co-founder and CEO of Genewiz. What drove you to start the company and what has your experience as an entrepreneur been like.
AL: What drove me to start the company was searching for people who just don’t like to follow the conventional tracks. Study and get a job, etc. Definitely nothing wrong with that as if everybody started a company, we wouldn’t be able to find employees. So for me, it is just the personality or nature I personally like. I like ambiguity, I like uncertainty and the other career for us, PHD’s in biological sciences, is two or three defined career types. One is you get a faculty position and get 10 years and with that it is pretty straightforward as you can see the end of your career from the beginning. That is a very clear cut path and in a sense. In a way that is too clear for me as if I know when I am 30 years old what I would end up being when I retire is a minus factor in my view. The other career is to work in the industry. Working in a pharmaceutical company. Starting your own company, there is a lot of uncertainty. You don’t know whether you’ll be buyable or not. Once you know you can survive, you don’t know how big you can be, how much impact you can make. Even now, 21 years later, a lot of those earlier questions are not relevant and it is clear that we are making a lot of impact, but I still don’t know where I will be 10 years from now, 20 years from now. So this uncertainty is still there and that makes the journey more interesting.
For more information, visit genewiz.com