Founders
Marc Salit
Marc Salit, PhD, is a metrologist and global leader in standards development for the genomic sciences. He began his metrological work at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), developing standards for chemistry and physics applications. His mid-career transition to work in the biological sciences was inspired by the opportunity to bring the rigors of the physical sciences to biological measurements.
Marc founded the External RNA Controls Consortium, which developed spike-in controls and measurement approaches to enable trustworthy measurement of RNA levels, first for microarray and then for NGS experiments. When human genome sequencing became feasible, he started the Genome in a Bottle (GiaB) consortium, which has produced reference materials as well as definitive benchmark datasets for human genome variant detection. GiaB has enabled the objective evaluation of novel sequencing technologies and bioinformatic variant detection pipelines, and has had an outsized impact on the rigorous evaluation of human genome sequencing results. As a result of these projects, he has an extensive publication record in high impact journals.
At the start of the current pandemic, Marc founded the Coronavirus Standards Working Group, an international consortium of academic, public health, clinical laboratory, and standards organization leaders, to bring the rigors of metrology to the SARS-CoV2 testing enterprise.
The recent surge in interest in Genomic Surveillance, and the associated measurement challenges that are familiar from his previous work, led him to found Viridae together with his long-time collaborator Arend Sidow.
Arend Sidow
Arend Sidow, PhD, is a molecular evolutionist and genomicist with a deep record of combining rigorous laboratory and computational applications development to solve pressing questions in basic biology. His early work in molecular evolution helped shape the convergence of phylogenetics and developmental biology; later at Stanford, in conjunction with his role as an advisor to both NHGRI's and JGI's large scale sequencing efforts in the 00's, his lab was at the forefront of Comparative Genomics, the science of extracting functional information on the basis of molecular evolutionary analyses.
With the advent of massively parallel genomics approaches, Arend's lab was among the first early access sites for several next generation sequencing technologies. His lab developed novel algorithmic approaches for the analysis of functional genomic data, particularly around gene regulation. As human genome sequencing became routine, he began collaborating with Marc on metrological approaches in genomics.
Arend co-founded DNAnexus, a leader in cloud-based analytics for genomic data and developer of PrecisionFDA, a platform to evaluate clinical sequencing results. At the start of the current pandemic, Arend developed a generic coronavirus test based on degenerate PCR and sequencing, which provided some of the inspiration to found Viridae together with Marc.