Sean McClain

Sean McClain, founder and CEO of Absci, started the company in 2011 with a bold goal to re-engineer E. coli to be an effective biomanufacturing system for twenty-first century biologics. Having accomplished that, and driven by the mantra “believe in the impossible,” Sean went on to build one of today’s most powerful platform technologies for drug discovery, which Absci is applying in pursuit of a vision to design drugs directly from patient tissues entirely in silico – with the click of a button. Uniquely merging cutting-edge machine learning AI with proprietary bioinformatics pipelines and high throughput synthetic biology methods, Absci takes protein-based drug discovery beyond nature’s boundaries to bring breakthrough medicines into the lives of patients with unprecedented speeds. Under Sean’s leadership, Absci has raised over $425M, become a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: ABSI), grown to more than 200 employees, acquired pioneering deep learning company Denovium and target discovery company Totient, and established partnerships with industry-leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies including Merck and Astellas. Sean, who studied biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Arizona, has been recognized as an “allstar” in the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 cohort in Science, named as an Entrepreneur of The Year 2020 Pacific Northwest Region Award Winner, included among the 2021 Endpoints News 20 Under Forty Biopharma leaders, and awarded the OEN 30th Anniversary Award. Sean serves as a board member for the Oregon Bioscience Association, the Oregon Translational Research and Development Institute, and Life Science Washington.