Nuclera Announces Appointment of Colin Barnes and Kristine Friscino to its Executive Leadership Team
June 3, 2022
Colin Barnes (left) and Kristine Friscino (right)
CAMBRIDGE, UK (May, 2022) – Nuclera, a biotechnology company accelerating protein expression workflows, has announced the appointment of two new members of their team: Colin Barnes, as VP of Intellectual Property and Kristine Friscino, as AVP of Marketing.
“We are so excited to have both Colin and Kristine on board. In this challenging labor market, we’ve been extremely fortunate to source top-tier, experienced industry professionals to build out our leadership team” said Dr. Michael Chen, CEO and cofounder of Nuclera. “These hires fill the last two open positions on our executive leadership team and we’re excited to now fully focus on the commercial launch of our eProtein desktop bioprinter in 2023.”
Colin Barnes PhD CPA EPA MRSC, Vice President of Intellectual Property
Colin is an experienced patent attorney who has already worked with Nuclera for several years as outside counsel, writing over 20 of Nuclera’s existing patents. Colin has nearly 25 years’ experience working with global biotechnology companies and is looking forward to helping turn the patents into commercial products.
Colin has a PhD in nucleic acid chemistry from the Institute of Cancer Research in London. In 1997 he became postdoctoral research associate in the Balasubramanian group in Cambridge, where later the Nuclera founders met. During his time in the group, he worked on developing a new DNA sequencing method, ideas which became the company Solexa. Colin was the first employee of Solexa, working at Illumina until 2010, where he qualified as a patent attorney. Colin is an inventor on over 50 granted EP and US patents on the sequencing methodology as practiced by Illumina. In 2010 he moved to Cambridge legal firm Stratagem IPM, where he worked for 12 years helping many SME’s develop their patent portfolios.
“Having worked on establishing the world's foremost sequencing platform, I am excited to be able to help Nuclera do the same for protein expression, and am eager to set up the in-house IP department and become an inventor again.”
Kristine Friscino, Associate Vice President, Marketing
Kristine is an accomplished, forward-thinking commercial leader with significant experience building and nurturing high-performing sales and marketing teams within the life science industry. Kristine started her career in the lab as a Research Technician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, MA. She brings a wealth of industry-specific experience to the team having spent the last 17 years at Abcam, a global leader in biological reagents.
Kristine is a tenured leader, having held a variety of commercial functions from sales to marketing to distribution to eProcurement. Kristine has a passion for building and scaling companies, joining shortly after Abcam established their US headquarters and since helped scale the commercial strategy with the growth of the business from $15M to almost $400M. Kristine is energized by the opportunity to work in a startup environment again and looks forward to helping to change protein synthesis.
“I am so excited to be part of team Nuclera working to commercialize the eProtein™ bioprinter and get it into customers hands. Nuclera’s technology brings speed and accessibility together in one platform which sits on the desktop. The benefits have the potential to change established workflows for protein synthesis and ultimately drug discovery and I am thrilled to be a part of that”.
