Origin story
The adventure leading to the creation of MaiBo Biotech started in 2008, when Damien Marsic joined Sergei Zolotukhin’s lab at the University of Florida as a postdoc in order to start a new career in the gene therapy field. He ended up staying at UF for 9 years during which he developed a novel approach to design and construct AAV capsid libraries and was involved with multiple directed evolution projects, leading to 10 published articles and 10 patent applications. Damien then worked for AstraZeneca for 2 years where he developed a lung-targeted AAV capsid, before being recruited by Porton Advanced Solutions where he worked for 4 years, developing liver-directed and retinal capsids. Damien co-founded MaiBo Biotech in October 2023.
Our mission
Our ambition is to contribute to the advancement of human gene therapy by helping to make it more effective, safer, more affordable, and accessible to larger numbers of patients. We will accomplish this by developing novel capsids with higher transduction efficiency and increased tissue specificity, allowing lower doses to be administered, therefore improving both patient safety and treatment efficacy while lowering the cost, and with enhanced evasion of preexisting neutralizing antibodies, therefore allowing a larger fraction of patients to receive the treatment they need.
What’s in our name?
The Chinese name MaiBo was inspired by the following quote by John Muir:
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
John Muir, 1911
The character 麦 (mài) means wheat, and 博 (bó) means plentiful. Maibo is homophonic with the word meaning “pulse”, which evokes network and connection.
