Willem P. C. "Pim" Stemmer was a Dutch scientist and entrepreneur who has invented numerous biotechnologies that have led to successful products and business ventures.
Education
Stemmer attended the Institut Montana-Zug, a boarding and day school in Zugerberg, Switzerland, in the greater Zurich area, from which he graduated in 1975. He developed an interest in biology at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, from which he received a Master of Surgery in biology in 1980.
lieutenant was not until 1980, however, when he traveled to University of Wisconsin-Madison that he was introduced to molecular biology. He received a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin for his work on bacterial pili and fimbriae involved in host-pathogen interactions.
Afterwards, he conducted postdoctoral research with Professor Fred Blattner on phage display of random peptide libraries and antibody fragment expression in East. coli bacteria.
Career
His other prominent inventions include deoxyribonucleic acid shuffling, now referred to as molecular breeding. He holds more than 97 patents. Stemmer died of cancer on April 2, 2013.
Stemmer founded Avidia after inventing its Avimer technology.
In 1997 he founded Maxygen to commercialize the deoxyribonucleic acid shuffling, now called molecular breeding, which led to the founding of both Verdia and Codexis. Prior to Maxygen, he was a scientist at Affymax, where he invented deoxyribonucleic acid shuffling.
Before that, he worked on antibody fragment engineering at Hybritech. His current venture, Amunix, is based in Mountain View, California.
Its products comprise a "clinically proven pharmaceutical payload, typically a, genetically fused to ‘XTEN’, a long, unstructured, hydrophilic protein chain", which prolongs serum half-life by "increasing the hydrodynamic radius, thus reducing kidney filtration".
He founded Versartis which is one of Amunix’s spin off companies. Versartis went public on March 21st, 2014.
Membership
He was elected as member of National Academy of Engineering.