About Us

We are a different type of biotech company. Think of us as an architecture design and build firm, but for microbes. Our unconventional approach and innovative technologies are our advantage, and we want to leverage this fresh perspective for your success.

Our Mission

Traditional strain engineering approaches take too long, cost too much, and carry too much risk of failure. Adherence to these conventions has darkened routes to market success. At Firelight Biosciences, we are on a mission to illuminate the path forward for our clients by sparking innovation with a burning desire to achieve a brighter future. We want to work with you to develop the next generation of microbes to meet your commercialization goals.

Our Values

Accountability: We strive to go above and beyond for our clients to overcome any challenge.
Collaboration: We believe when everyone’s voices are heard, everyone’s needs are met.
Creativity: We leverage agility and flexibility to come up with innovative solutions for our clients.
Transparency: We provide access to tools, strains, and data as the keys to success for our clients.

Our Services

Strain Engineering

Strain optimization

Enzyme discovery and engineering

Protein engineering

Production chassis optimization

Genome editing

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Metabolic engineering

Pathway design and build

Expression vector design and build

Microbe domestication

Biocontainment

Bioinformatics

Genome analysis software

Bioinformatics pipelines

Regulatory and biosecurity analysis

Next-gen sequencing and analysis

Biological data collection for ML/AI

Founding Partners

Tyson Shepherd, Ph.D.

Tyson brings his broad synthetic biology expertise to each project, having led R&D efforts and co-authored more than 20 publications and 11 patent filings across fields such as protein engineering, genome engineering, synthetic genomics, and information data storage in DNA. Tyson has a BS in Physics from Illinois State University, an MS in Physics from Georgia Tech, and a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Iowa, and has held postdoctoral research appointments at Uppsala University and MIT. He has 5 years industry experience from Monsanto and Inscripta.

Charlotte Cialek, Ph.D.

Charlotte is an accomplished scientist and research project leader with a B.A. from Northern Michigan University and a Ph.D. from Colorado State University. During the pandemic, she helped launch the COVID screening assay at CSU. Her published research, including first-authorship in Nature Communications, appears in journals including ACS Synthetic Biology, Scientific Reports, Cell Reports, and Nucleic Acids Research. With five years of industry experience at SynBio startups GenoFAB and Inscripta, Charlotte drives innovation in biotech.

Daniel Held, Ph.D.

Dan has a proven record of scientific and organizational leadership over his 17 years at biotech companies including Codexis, Novozymes, and Inscripta. Dan is a molecular biology and strain engineering expert with an innovative mindset and a passion for directed evolution approaches at the gene, pathway, and genome level. Dan was co-founder and CSO at Infinome Biosciences and is currently Professor of Practice in the Biotechnology Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. Dan earned his B.S. in Biological Sciences at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and his Ph.D. at Indiana University.

Ready to learn more?

We’re here to work with you. Contact us for more information.