Dr. John Schloendorn | Founder & CEO | Gene & Cell Technologies | Garage Lab

BioCurious (World’s First Hackerspace for Bio, Built in the Heart of Silicon Valley) was inspired by John’s garage lab. John is the CEO of Gene and Cell Technologies of which he also founded in 2013. Gene and Cell Technologies is a vertically integrated regenerative medicine company. They race to develop cures for all diseases using true cell replacement medicine. Along the way, they create their own tools and build infrastructure. They offer some of their tools to other scientists through their store.

Tell me about yourself, the Garage lab and why did you build it?

So first, it’s probably not right to view me as a “DIY” or “hacker”. I’m a formally trained professional with Phd, academic publications, and all. Once upon a time, I came across certain unanswered science questions about how genes and cells worked. Typically these can’t be answered by thinking, but need to be answered experimentally, by probing genes and cells in a lab. I didn’t have a lab, so I needed to build one. My garage made fine real estate for that.

What types of equipment did you find you needed and what were the challenges you encountered?

I worked in human cell culture back then, cancer immunology specifically. The main thing about keeping cultures of human cells alive is to keep microorganisms out, because cultured cells have no immune system to protect them. So ever speck of dirt with a single bacterium on them will destroy them. The main setup you need to keep them clean is sterile air filtration, similar to what’s used in computer chip etching. You can get that kind of setup for free, if you’re willing to wait long enough for someone to go out of business who isn’t willing to carry this heavy gear around to wherever they move on to. It’s similar to how you can get a free dish washer on Craigslist. Find someone in a wealthy neighborhood who is moving, and doesn’t feel like lifting heavy things — done. So in that kind of ecosystem, the rule is you can get most things for free, if you’re willing to wait. The faster you want something, the more you need to pay, which goes all the way up to a $10,000 university-grade cell culture cabinet (which still isn’t a completely prohibitive amount of money for most Silicon Valley denizens I would assume).

What types of projects you have at the moment?

I was working on cancer immunology back then. I was trying to study whether or not the immune system of a healthy human has an intrinsic ability to recognize and destroy cancer. It may sound quite unbelievable given what headlines you see out there, but my honest view is that we still don’t have a satisfying degree of visibility into this rather basic question. So that’s what I worked on, in cell culture. I took my own blood, and that of trusted friends, and made them fight cancer in a petri dish. It’s quite entertaining to watch in time lapse. Here’s one immune cell donor who made a video of a cell called an eosinophil granulocyte, purified from his own blood, beating up a dreaded ovarian cancer cell line Granulocytes VS SKOV3.