Amber Ratcliffe
What Comes After Cracking the Code
Among the requirements of her hyper-evolving job description, Amber Ratcliffe (MBA 2003), co-founder of next-generation bioscience firm NanoString Technologies, finds a strong facility with metaphor essential.
“It’s a little complicated,” she admits. “So the way we describe it is that we have created a bar code system to track individual molecules in a biological sample.”
Now that the human genome has been sequenced, scientists are working to understand how gene expression differs between, for instance, a liver cell and a blood cell — or a diseased cell and a healthy cell. The ramifications are the very future of science.
The current method of measuring large-scale gene expression, microarray analysis, can be frustratingly imprecise and time-consuming. But NanoString’s platform promises a dramatic improvement, and it’s setting the science world abuzz.
The company sprang from Seattle’s seminal Institute for Systems Biology. After earning an undergraduate degree in biochemistry, Ratcliffe joined Dr. Leroy Hood at the UW to work on the Human Genome Project. When Hood founded the Institute in 2000, Ratcliffe went with him, and joined Dr. Krassen Dimitrov to form the department of microarrays. Dimitrov soon became frustrated with this highly flawed measurement technology and came up with the idea to tag each molecule and count them.
By this time, Ratcliffe knew she was interested in the management of scientific discovery and wanted to get an MBA. Though Dimitrov wanted her to help him start a company around his invention, she decided to enroll at the UW Business School. “I said, ‘Maybe we can regroup once you are ready to get going,’” she recalls. “I didn’t think it would actually happen. There are so few things that work out in science.”
Ratcliffe did offer to write a business plan for NanoString to enter in the 2003 Business Plan Competition: “I told Krassen, ‘If it works out, you’ll have a great business plan and I’ll keep the money.’ That was our deal.”
Partnering with Aaron Coe (MBA 2004), NanoString did win the UW Business Plan Competition, and finished third at the Purdue National Life Sciences Business Plan Competition. Coe stepped out to finish his MBA. But Ratcliffe and Dimitrov moved forward, hiring Seattle Genetics CEO Perry Fell (EMBA 1987) to take over top management. They raised $8 million to develop a marketable prototype and to increase the number of distinct genes it can analyze in a sample.
Now they are ready to go after the $2 billion gene expression market. But NanoString’s technology could also revolutionize genotyping, proteomics, molecular diagnostics, agriculture, forensics, bio-surveillance, environmental science and even enable the ultimate dream of predictive, preventative, personalized medicine.
Ratcliffe has grown as quickly as her company. Well, it’s not really hers anymore. And that’s okay.
“It’s critical for founders to give up the idea of being a founder,” she says. “All that’s important is being a contributing member of a team and that the team is the best you can make.”
Now the director of technical operations, Ratcliffe is overseeing manufacturing development. She’s also done market studies and managed intellectual property protection. She will soon move into a lead marketing and business development role.
It’s a pretty exciting ride, taken against the advice of many mentors and despite some golden job opportunities with proven bioscience companies. “I took a tremendous leap of faith to start NanoString,” she says. “But I was not going to live my life wondering what would have happened if…”