Portfolio Press Release
Michael Hunkapiller To Serve On Fluidigm Board Of Directors
South San Francisco, CA - August 29, 2005 — Distinguished scientist and industry leader Michael W. Hunkapiller has been appointed to the Board of Directors at Fluidigm Corporation. Dr. Hunkapiller is widely celebrated for his contributions to life science throughout his 21 years at Applied Biosystems (NYSE: ABI), which he helped to grow from startup to almost $2 billion in annual revenues. The appointment coincides with an investment by Alloy Ventures, the investment capital firm Dr. Hunkapiller joined in 2004.
"Mike has led the commercialization of more market-creating products than anyone in the life-science instrumentation field," said Fluidigm CEO Gajus Worthington. "His decision to join Fluidigm's Board is a tremendous endorsement."
Mike joined ABI in 1983 and held several scientific and business positions before being promoted in 1992 to executive vice president. From 1995 to 2004 he held the company's top offices as general manager and president. His tenure witnessed the genesis of tools for modern molecular biology in which innovations, such as the polymerase chain reaction, and automation of tedious manual processes led to an explosion of genomic and proteomic data. Throughout this period Mike was pivotal to crafting the R&D strategies and alliances that elevated ABI to the foremost supplier of molecular-biology reagents and instrumentation in academic and industrial laboratories.
"Fluidigm's technology is fundamentally different from what has gone before in tools for molecular biology, but is exactly what the industry needs to progress to orders of magnitude higher efficiencies," said Dr. Hunkapiller. "The dynamic array chip will become a mainstay of the industry in years to come." (Fluidigm's dynamic array is a nanofluidic chip for ultra high-throughput assays of nucleic acids and proteins.)
Dr. Hunkapiller was also a founder of ABI's sister company Celera Genomics (NYSE: CRA) and Senior Vice President of Applera Corporation (ABI's parent corporation). Prior to joining ABI, Mike was a senior research fellow in the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He received a B.S. in chemistry from Oklahoma Baptist University in 1970 and a Ph.D. in chemical biology from Caltech in 1974. He has authored more than 100 scientific publications, is an inventor on more than two dozen patents, and has served on several editorial boards of scientific journals.
About Fluidigm
Fluidigm develops and distributes systems based on integrated fluidic circuits (IFCs) for analysis and synthesis of biomolecules in nano- and pico-volume environments. The company's vision is to create and to lead a new industry in which IFCs deliver previously inconceivable efficiencies to diverse fields. Fluidigm currently markets the TOPAZ chip as well as hardware, software and consumables for protein crystallization and is developing its dynamic array IFC as a system for high-throughput analysis of nucleic acids and proteins and detection of very rare sequences in a high-background sample. Based in South San Francisco, California, the Company is privately held and backed by premier investors: Versant Ventures, Euclid SR Partners, InterWest Partners, Lehman Brothers Healthcare Fund, Bruce Burrows, the Singapore EDB, Lilly BioVentures, the Invus Group, GE Equity, SightLine Partners, and Alloy Ventures.