Steven ten Holder
Role: Investigator
Site: CDL-Vancouver
Stream: Biomedical Engineering
Steven ten Holder conceived of and co-founded Acorn Biolabs, a biotech startup accelerated by Y-Combinator, incubated by Johnson&Johnson, and funded by over $11M of venture and partner investment. Steven is credited as an inventor on two of Acorn’s core patents. Acorn non-invasively collects, transports, and cryopreserves young cells directly from consumers to superpower future longevity therapeutics. At the University of Waterloo, Steven conceived of and designed a CRISPR anti-viral immunity system for Arabidopsis plants — a novel genetic engineering strategy. He co-led the wet-lab execution and his synthetic biology team was recognized with a ‘gold medal’ from iGEM for their work. He also earned an academic publication for a synthetic biology system representing a mathematical model of plasmid incompatibility using engineered DNA of his design.