Cardea Bio Seeks to Accelerate Corporate Vision, Adds 3 Seasoned Executives to Senior Leadership Team


“We are thrilled to bring these exceptional people onboard to realize our vision of helping the world Conduct Biology™,” Says CEO, Michael Heltzen

Cardea Bio, a new (bio)technology infrastructure company pioneering the development of biology-gated transistors to integrate biology and electronics, announced today that it has added four highly successful and experienced leaders to its senior management team.


  • Dr. Paul Grint as Chairman of Innovation Council
  • Jonathan Seaton as Senior Vice President, Corporate & Business Development
  • Rob Lozuk as Senior Vice President, Commercial Operations

With decades of combined experience ranging from Paul Grint’s time as the former CEO of AmpliPhi and an Illumina Board member, Jonathan Seaton, Illumina’s former Senior Vice President (SVP) of Corporate & Business Development, after VP positions at BD Life Sciences and Roche, and Rob Lozuk’s executive positions at Sequenom and Thermo Fisher Scientific, Cardea has just positioned itself for accelerated growth under an experienced leadership team.

“This talent infusion enables Cardea to accelerate our business while validating the attractiveness of our vision and the substantial opportunity in front of us. We are thrilled to bring these exceptional people onboard to realize our vision of helping the world Conduct Biology™,” says CEO, Michael Heltzen.

Cardea has appointed Paul Grint, MD as its Chairman of the inaugural Cardea Innovation Council. In this position, Dr. Grint will lead a group of high-profile Innovation advisors and experts, who will be announced later in Q1 2020. Dr. Grint is a proven biotechnology executive with more than two decades of experience leading both established and emerging biotech companies working in the areas of infectious disease, immunology, and oncology.

Most recently, Dr. Grint was CEO and a member of the board of directors of AmpliPhi Biosciences, which recently merged with C3J Therapeutics to form Armata Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Grint has also served in senior management roles at Cerexa, Forest Laboratories, Kalypsys, Pfizer, IDEC Pharmaceuticals, and Schering-Plough Corporation.

“Cardea has created an entirely new way for scientists from any industry to access biology. The Innovation Council will leverage our members’ diverse technology and industry backgrounds from life sciences, bioinformatics, agriculture, electronics, diagnostics as well as food and environmental safety to identify innovation partners and new solutions to industry bottlenecks and problems,” said Dr. Grint.

Cardea’s Innovation Council is actively engaged in supporting the company’s mission to connect the domain of biology to more traditional technology and computer infrastructures, enabling greater access to bio-data in numerous applications; now referred to as the “Internet of Biology”.

Jonathan Seaton has joined Cardea as SVP for Corporate & Business Development where Mr. Seaton’s access to peers in the global life science world will be the starting point for more product co-development partnerships. Cardea’s biology-based transistor infrastructure will offer partner’s the tech modules to create a new generation of life science applications and devices branded and sold under the partner’s brand.

Prior to joining Cardea, Mr. Seaton held the position of SVP, Corporate & Business Development at Illumina, and prior to that he was VP, Strategy and Business Development at BD Life Sciences and Vice Director, Global Business Development at Roche Diagnostics.

“Cardea is pioneering a new method of life science detection and expanding the scope of possible insights. The Cardean infrastructure is not just generating data-sets, but also the data-streams of interactive signals from systems biology. It even allows for multi-omics analysis due to the biocompatible graphene transistors, which do not require the amplification and optics that often are the bottlenecks in life sciences,” says Mr. Seaton.

Rob Lozuk has been assisting Cardea throughout most of 2019 as an executive business consultant. Rob was initially responsible for building the Cardea Innovation Partnership Program and is now transitioning into a broader role as Cardea’s SVP of Commercial Operations, a role he also held previously at Sequenom, where he was responsible for sales, marketing, commercial and laboratory operations.

“Through our Innovation Partnership Program, Cardea is working with a select group of prestigious partners to create a new generation of “Internet of Biology” enabled products. Cardea’s proprietary, biology-gated transistor infrastructure will have an enormous impact on the world as partners will now be able to market new “biology is technology” applications inside instruments and/or portable devices only once imagined,” says Mr. Lozuk.

“It’s rare to have a detection breakthrough that significantly expands the number and type of applications within and outside of the traditional life science markets. Cardea’s technology leverages all of the learnings and methods of scaling from the well-established semiconductor industry while opening a whole new playing field in-between biology and electronics that has the capability of bringing valuable insights to every human being on the planet,” continues Mr. Lozuk.

About Cardea Bio

Cardea Bio is developing a new generation of (bio)technology infrastructure based on proprietary biology-gated transistors (“Cardean transistors”). Cardean transistors leverage biocompatible graphene instead of silicon and replace optical signal observations with direct electrical molecular signal analysis. Until now, life science data was comprised of static snapshot datasets. With Cardean transistors, the company and its Innovation Partners can generate streaming multi-omics data to measure real-time biological signals. Cardea is now manufacturing chips at scale and partners have started to significantly expand the amount, type and quality of biological data they capture by building products that Conduct Biology™. Cardea is headquartered in San Diego, California.

For more information, please visit cardeabio.com and engage with us on Twitter @Cardeabio or on LinkedIn.

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