Muse bio appoints Kevin Ness new company CEO

Friday December 9, 2016 Tags: Muse bio, Boulder, Dr. Kevin Ness, Ryan Gill

BOULDER -- Muse bio, a privately-held company leading the development of next-generation genome engineering technologies, announced Dr. Kevin Ness has been appointed CEO and a member of the company’s board of directors.

Ness succeeds Muse bio's founding CEO Ryan Gill, who becomes the company's chief science officer as well as remains Slade Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and executive director of the BioDesign Center at the RAS Energy Institute at UC-Boulder.

"Kevin brings incredible experience to drive the commercialization of Muse bio's ForgeCraft technology," said Gill.

"I am looking forward to working with Kevin to make Muse bio a tremendous success. The company will benefit from his innovative approach to developing and commercializing novel tools in support of the biotechnology industry."  

Ness spent his career transforming early-stage ideas into successful ventures. Prior to joining Muse bio, he was co-founder, chief technology officer and chief operating officer of 10X Genomics.

Previously, he co-founded and was VP of product development at QuantaLife, acquired by Bio-RAD in 2011. Ness and his teams developed and commercialized products such as droplet digital PCR (ddPCR), Linked-Read sequencing, and high-throughput, single-cell gene expression measurement solutions.

"My sincere compliments go to Ryan and the Muse bio team for developing their revolutionary ForgeCraft technology which will significantly improve the efficiency and precision of genome engineering, bringing the capabilities of genome writing to parity with genome reading," said Ness.

"I am looking forward to joining Muse bio to drive ForgeCraft to commercial success."

Muse bio said it is enabling a new era of genome engineering that will transform understanding of biology. Muse bio delivers power to researchers and production scientists in the field of genome engineering and synthetic biology through the combination of a powerful computer-aided forward design software package, a proprietary benchtop biofoundry and associated reagents.