Shoreline Biome Hires New CEO and VP of Business Development

FARMINGTON, Conn., August 26, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Shoreline Biome, a microbiome research company that develops tools for characterizing microbiome populations down to the strain level, has hired Bill McKenzie as its CEO and Karen Woodward as its VP of Business Development.

These two new hires are expected to help Shoreline Biome meet growing demand for its products and expand the company's sales worldwide.

Prior to joining Shoreline Biome, Bill McKenzie was a managing partner at Upstart Life Science, a management consulting firm that partners with life science founders to help realize their dream of bringing transformative technologies to the world. McKenzie honed his business skills at Millipore and PerkinElmer where he held both mid-manager and executive level positions. While there, he launched a number of highly successful new businesses in the molecular diagnostics, life science research, and medical device markets and has designed and negotiated numerous partnerships and acquisitions. He has served on a number of life science company boards and is currently a board member at seqWell, a next-generation sequencing company in Beverly, Mass. McKenzie was a board member at WaferGen BioSystems, a genomics company in Freemont, Calif., and was instrumental in its merger with Takara Bio in 2017. He also served on the board at Quad Technologies, a cell separations company, headquartered in Woburn, Mass., and acquired by Bio-Techne in 2018.

Karen Woodward, Ph.D., developed and launched new genomic products in the microarray space at several life sciences companies, including Packard BioChip, PerkinElmer and GeneXP Biosciences. She led strategic business development and partnership efforts at several genomic services laboratories, including Beckman Coulter Genomics, Covance and Generation Health. Woodward was instrumental in multimillion-dollar sales that lead to the 2009 acquisition of Cogenics by Beckman Coulter in 2009, as well as the successful commercialization and launch of Covance Genomics services after the acquisition of Merck's Rosetta operation in Seattle. Woodward served as VP of Strategic Operations and Account Management at Generation Health (acquired by CVS Caremark) and its spin-out, MetaDiagnostic. Prior to joining Shoreline Biome, Dr. Woodward was the Industry Liaison for Life Sciences at UConn Technology Commercialization Services. She received her Ph.D. in molecular genetics and microbiology from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and her B.A. in biology from Clark University.

About Shoreline Biome
Characterizing the human microbiome and analyzing its role in human health and disease are priority goals for researchers around the world. Shoreline Biome accelerates breakthroughs in microbiome research by developing transformative discovery tools that characterize microbiome populations down to the strain level. With Shoreline Biome products, all it takes is three easy steps: lyse, purify, and amplify. Shoreline Biome's easy-to-use companion analysis software and comprehensive reference database enables straightforward strain-level identification and quantitation of all bacteria in the sample. To learn more, visit shorelinebiome.com.

SOURCE Shoreline Biome