Stephanie Culler

Persephone Biosciences is a synthetic biology company reimagining patient and infant health through the development of microbiome-based medicines, building an end-to-end platform to industrialize the development of engineered cells that restore health to damaged human ecosystems. Persephone's ARGONAUT trial is the largest U.S. study of its kind, enrolling individuals with advanced non-small cell lung cancer, triple-negative breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and pancreatic cancer to assess whether microbiome analysis can predict patients' progression-free survival on treatment.

Culler co-founded Persephone in 2017 alongside Steve Van Dien, Ph.D., drawing on their shared expertise as synthetic and metabolic engineering pioneers. Prior to Persephone, she was a Senior Scientist at Genomatica, where she developed and applied synthetic biology tools toward engineering microorganisms as biocatalysts for the industrial production of sustainable chemicals. She received her B.S. from UC San Diego and her Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology, both in chemical engineering. She is a graduate of the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator and has spoken at TEDx San Diego.