About Us
Full Circles was formed with the motive of creating novel gene editing techniques to make therapies more accessible. Our proprietary C4DNA® molecule and Tesogenase® delivery platform ensure higher efficiency and scalable manufacturing of gene-edited cells.
Our team comprises experts with 10+ years of experience in the CGT market. Not only are we driven by the passion to cure genetic disorders, but we also strive to make these therapies more affordable. Developing modular platforms to achieve high delivery efficiencies, our platform provides unique technological benefits in comparison to traditional viral vectors.
Richard Shan, PhD
Co-founder, President and CEO
Dr. Shan is an active entrepreneur who has almost 30 years of experience in genomic innovation for DNA reading and writing. He is the inventor of the GATALYST™ non-viral targeted genomic integration method. Dr. Shan is the co-founder, President, and CEO of Full Circles Therapeutics, where he is dedicated to developing curative gene editing-based gene/cell therapy.
Before founding Full Circles Therapeutics, Dr. Shan founded Quintara Bioscience providing one-stop shop service for DNA synthesis and sequencing. Dr. Shan obtained PhD in cell and molecular Biology at University of Wisconsin Madison before he got the Miller research postdoc fellow at UC Berkley.
Howard (Hao) Wu, PhD
Co-founder, CSO
Dr. Wu has around 20 years of experience in gene editing technology and new drug discovery. He oversees R&D programs, new labs, and research teams set up in the biotech start-ups. His research and discovery experience covers a variety of diseases, including neurodevelopment and neurodegenerative diseases, neuromuscular disease, cardiac disease, hematological disease, and metabolic disease. Dr. Wu is the co-founder and CSO of Full Circles Therapeutics, where he is dedicated to developing curative gene editing-based gene/cell therapy.
Before founding Full Circles Therapeutics, Dr. Wu led the discovery programs and disease prioritization at Fulcrum Therapeutics Inc., a Cambridge small molecule drug discovery biotech company. He had been with the company through the full development phases, starting from the start-up and expansion until post-IPO development, during which he led a team for portfolio disease selection and prioritization of multiple disease programs, including neuromuscular disease, cardiac disease, hematological and pulmonary diseases. Dr. Wu was a Human Frontier Science Program Postdoc fellow at Johns Hopkins Medical Institute and a senior research fellow at Whitehead Institute, MIT. His research focused on neurological disorders utilizing CRISPR/Cas9 mediated genomic and epigenomic editing technology. Dr. Wu has over 30 publications in top tier jounals.
Xuemei He, PhD
VP, Head of DNA manufacture
Keqiang Xie, PhD
VP, Head of Discovery Biology
Jiao Wang, PhD
Sr. Scientist,
Discovery Biology
Ishita Deb Majumdar
Sr. Scientist, Platform Discovery
Sarah Niemi
Sr. Research Associate
Alyssa Shan
Sr. Research Associate
Christopher Voigt, Ph.D.
Scientific Founder/SAB
Christopher Voigt is an institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is also the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT and is the co-director of the MIT Synthetic Biology Center, where his lab is located. His lab focuses on pushing genetic engineering to the scale and sophistication required to design genomes from the bottom up. They have developed genetically encoded sensors and circuits and have used these to control multiple pathways and cellular functions. This has been applied to the optimization of chemical and materials production and to the discovery of novel pharmaceuticals. Several companies have been founded out of Voigt’s lab, including Pivot Biotechnologies (agricultural), and Asimov (mammalian cell programming for biologics). Voigt serves on the scientific advisory boards of DSM, Zymergen, Twist Biosciences, SynLogic, Design Therapeutics, Senti Biosciences, Aanika, Empress Therapeutics, Generate Biomedicines, DeepBiome Therapeutics, and General Probiotics. He founded the journal ACS Synthetic Biology and he co-founded the SEED conference series.
Rudolf Jaenisch, Ph.D.
Scientific Founder/SAB
Rudolf Jaenisch joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984. His central research interest is to understand epigenetic regulation of gene expression in mammalian development and disease. He is a pioneer in the understanding of how to transdifferentiate cells from one type to another. Rudolf’s work with embryonic stem cells is providing fundamental discoveries for the field of regenerative medicine. His numerous awards and honors include the Genetics Prize from the Gruber Foundation (2001), election to the National Academy of Sciences (2003), the Max Delbruck Medal (2006), the National Medal of Science (2010), the Wolf Prize in Medicine (2011) and the Otto Warburg Medal (2014). Earlier in his career, Rudolf held research positions at Princeton University, the Fox Chase Institute for Cancer Research and the Salk Institute. From 1977 to 1984, he was the head of the department of tumor biology at the Heinrich Pette Institute at the University of Hamburg. Rudolf earned his M.D. from the University of Munich in 1967 and conducted postdoctoral work in bacteriophages at the Max Planck Institute.
Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD
Scientific Founder/SAB
Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD is the Scientific Co-Founder and President of the Scientific Advisory Board at Mnemo. He is the founding director of the Center for Cell Engineering at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), where he holds the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Chair, a member of the department of Medicine and of the Immunology program of the Sloan Kettering Institute, and a professor of Immunology at Weill-Cornell Medical College. Following his post-doctoral research at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, he joined MSK in 1994. Dr. Sadelain has made several key contributions to the emergence and success of CD19 chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy. His research has contributed to all facets of CAR therapy, including T cell engineering methodologies (via retroviral vectors or gene editing), CAR design (dual-signaling receptor concept, known as second generation CAR), target identification (most notably CD19), T cell manufacturing (GMP processes, in collaboration with Dr. Isabelle Rivière at MSK) and clinical translation (in acute lymphoblastic leukemia and other cancers). Dr. Sadelain received his M.D. from the University of Paris (Pierre et Marie Curie) in 1984 and his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 1989.
Trusted By
Pathbreaker Award
Contact Us
Let’s join hands to achieve a world without genetic disorders.
We are looking to form strategic partnerships for cell engineering workflows and cell line development alongside rapid manufacturing of biologics, including CAR-T cells and hematopoietic stem cells. Feel free to explore our current pipelines in development or reach out to talk with us about a new possibility. We can also license our technology to support your workflows.