Who Is Fernando Andrade, M.S.?
Fernando Andrade is the CEO of Radegen Biotechnology and a graduate of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.
By: Fernando Andrade, M.S.*
*Chief Executive Officer and Research and Development Director, Radegen Biotechnology. Cardwell Collaborative, 5130 Gtwy Blvd. 3rd Floor, El Paso, TX 79905.
Bio Sketch:
Fernando Andrade was born October 1st, 1983 in El Paso, Texas at 10:30-ish PM and was born to Maria de Jesus Andrade and Fernando Loya Andrade. He has two brothers, one sister (Eduardo, Ricardo, and Elizabeth Andrade), one half-brother, and one half-sister (Fernando Isaac and Caroyln Denise Andrade) from his father’s previous marriage. Fernando Andrade started school at Surratt Elementary in Clint, Texas as pre-kindergarten in 1988 and proceeded uninterrupted until the end of 6th grade in 1996. That summer he moved to Chicago Illinois and lived in the suburb called Darien Illinois where he attended Lake View Junior High for the entirety of the 7th grade. He began the 8th grade at Lake View but moved back to Clint, Texas shortly after and started the mid-fall semester at Clint Junior High. He graduated from Clint High School in 2002 and had a productive high school career where he focused on college prep, band, debate, and golf.
In the fall of 2002 he attended Southwest Texas State University, today simply called Texas State University where he successfully completed is first year of basic studies. He slowed down the speed of progress for completing school after he met his wife, Gina Yvette Jaramillo-Andrade (born 10/01/1984 in Houston, TX) on the 25th day of February 2005 and Gina and Fernando began a tour de academia in Texas in the summer of 2005 when they moved to El Paso, Texas to attend college. He discovered he was a genius at molecular biology in his freshman-year biology class at UTEP and shortly after found out that his wife was pregnant with their first child. Fernando Andrade completed an entirely fulfilling and industrious undergraduate training accompanied by his daughter Audrey Elyse Andrade, born August 26, 2006 and his wife Gina since they would often spend hours waiting for Fernando to finish a laboratory in the University library. Fernando completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Houston — Downtown in the Fall of 2010 and took coursework all over Texas including The University of Texas at El Paso, Leveland College in Lubbock, Texas, South Plains College in Pasadena, Texas, and The University of Houston Main Campus. He completed advanced coursework in the history of science, medicine, and technology; biotech entrepreneurship; chemistry; and molecular biology obtaining a bachelor of science in biology and a minor in chemistry.
His laboratory scientist career began when he completed a rigorous undergraduate research project in enzymology with his undergraduate mentor Dr. Phil Lyons at UHD where he studied the natural abundance of laccase enzymes among ascomycetes isolated from prairie soils. In the Spring of 2011, he completed post-bachelorette work in advanced biochemistry as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Houston Main Campus Biochemistry Department under the direction of Dr. Donna Pattison where he worked preparing reagents and provided classroom support for an applied research teaching curriculum teaching students protein engineering. He mastered advanced biochemistry laboratory techniques while assisting in the development of laboratory protocols for a new curriculum fusing mCherry and GFP to a Drosophila HOX transcription factor that polymerized into silk-like threads and is of interest due to having desirable material properties. Fernando Andrade was accepted to a Master of Science at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston the Summer of 2011 where he completed the Microbiology and Molecular Genetics graduate coursework and a thesis-based degree, graduating in the Fall of 2013 under the direction of his PI, Dr. Heidi B. Kaplan. Fernando graduated with a master’s degree in Biomedical Science with a focus in Molecular Microbiology. After graduation, Fernando Andrade began a Ph.D. program within the same department, completed two years of rotations in various laboratories, and withdrew at the end of the Spring of 2015 to pursue a career in the biotechnology industry.
In the Fall of 2015 he began sales work with ATT in Houston, Texas, and started his scientific career with Nalco Champion in Sugarland, Texas as a Petroleum Microbiologist contractor. His contract ended in the winter of 2016 and he and his family which at this point consists of Gina and Audrey moved back to El Paso, Texas January 2017. In the Summer of 2017, Fernando Andrade began work as a temp-to-hire contractor with the Department of Homeland Security Biowatch laboratory in El Paso, Texas where he obtained security clearance to work with select agents like B. anthracis, Variola, F. tularensis, B. maliai and B. pseudomallei. His contract ended in the fall of the same year and he began work as an independent contractor in customer service and sales with NexRep. Here Fernando Andrade became an expert in remote call center applications and operations. While working at Nex-Rep Gina and Fernando had their second child, Abram Andrade on March 31st, 2018 while living in El Paso, TX. In the Summer of 2018, the now family of four moved to Iowa City, Iowa after Fernando Andrade became the new Application Scientist with the Synthetic Biology department at Integrated DNA Technologies in Coralville, Iowa. While at IDT Fernando Andrade was put in charge of developing technical documents that introduce scientists to synthetic DNA and his works were published in the form of a manual teaching scientists how to use synthetic DNA in molecular cloning. Fernando Andrade was a first responder during the COVID-19 pandemic and was personally involved with assisting big pharma customers like BioNTech, Moderna, and the Center for Disease Control to respond to the pandemic by assisting with the design of qPCR assays and therapeutics that are currently employed. Specifically, Fernando assisted with codon optimization of thousands of critical sequences that were tested and developed into the original vaccine marketed by Pfizer. He assisted Center for Disease control customers with positive control and primer design for qPCR COVID-19 detection assays. In the Summer of 2020 Fernando Andrade was offered an opportunity to develop the synthetic biology department at Archer Daniels Midland, a role that ended prematurely due to return to work COVID-19 issues happening at the company. After ADM, Fernando worked in several customer service and sales positions with companies like Charter Communications and Thermo Fisher Scientific.
In the Winter of 2021, after deciding to officially move back to Clint, TX Fernando Andrade decided to begin work on Radegen Biotechnology. He officially founded the company in January of 2022 when Fernando Andrade began a dual appointment as Chief Executive Officer and Scientific Technical Writer with his company. The company began operations of www.radegenbio.com and www.radegendna.com where multiple Creative Commons-protected publications founded the company by establishing a suite of intellectual property describing various molecular reagent technologies and marketing material. As of the publication of this article on 09/30/2023, Fernando Andrade is in the process of completing technical documentation for beginning operations and is waiting on funding. He has a signed 5-year commitment to begin operations at a biotech incubator housed by the new Texas Tech Medical School in El Paso, Texas called The Cardwell Collaborative. Once in operation, Fernando Andrade will offer Custom Synthetic Plasmids and will also sell the molecular tools that his team uses to generate complex DNA assemblies from chemically synthesized oligonucleotides. Our laboratory clones with synthetic DNA templates and is able to accept DNA sequences that may not meet manufacturing sequence designed standards with the competition. Fernando Andrade’s short and long-term goal is to continue leading his company, where he plans to continue selling custom cloning services, and state-of-the-art molecular reagents for qPCR, PCR, molecular cloning, cell-free biochemistry, strain, and protein engineering. His long-term goals are to build a facility in the El Paso, Texas area and become a permanent major biotech company specializing in genetic tools, molecular reagents, competent cells, and synthetic biology.
Fernando Andrade is a leading expert in the commerce of synthetic microbiology, molecular reagent design, and molecular cloning. His academic area of interest is in Pseudomonas biology, specifically in the physiology that mediates biofilm formation and motility. He has a special understanding of how microbes employ a battery of enzymes to modify their environment in order to make conditions favorable for persistent colonization and dissemination. His long-term research goals are to contribute original research to better understand how bacteria “terraform” an environment using complex sugars and lipids, how these molecules are synthesized and elaborated from the cytosol across the cell wall, their role in mediating translocation or attachment, quorum sensing, and kin recognition.
As of June 2024, Radegen Biotechnology exited the commercial sector and will no longer be pursuing the establishment of a laboratory. The main website, www.radegenbio.com has been repurposed as a persistent publication for the company’s creative works.
