Charles Bolten, Associate of Sourcing and Due Diligence, is responsible for identifying candidate technologies and performing due diligence prior to new company formation for inventions that he and the BioGenerator team determine to be strong candidates for investment. Mr. Bolten serves as the embedded Commercialization Fellow within the Washington University Office of Technology Management (OTM). There, Mr. Bolten reviews all invention disclosures from Washington University and works closely with the university business directors to determine which technologies warrant further examination as potential start-up companies.
Mr. Bolten began his research career as a student working on regulation of bovine growth hormone receptor expression in a Monsanto-funded endocrinology laboratory at the University of Missouri-Columbia. This interaction with Monsanto scientists led Mr. Bolten to accept a position as an undergraduate intern in the Monsanto Animal Agriculture Genomics group where he continued to work to apply transcriptional technologies to understanding endocrinology. At the completion of his Monsanto internship, Mr. Bolten accepted a one year internship with Searle Pharmaceuticals, where he began working on Nuclear Receptors as drug targets. While completing his undergraduate degree in biology, Mr. Bolten accepted a position as an Associate Scientist in the Transcriptional Profiling group at Searle, beginning a ten-year career in pharmaceutical drug discovery, and finished his studies at University of Missouri-St. Louis.
After several promotions, Mr. Bolten attained the position of Senior Scientist and Project Leader as he moved away from technology-driven approaches and became more involved in the scientific aspects of drug discovery. Mr. Bolten has held prominent positions on projects in all phases of drug discovery from new target validation to first in human, as well as roles on various strategy teams in cardiovascular and metabolic disease research. In 2006, Mr. Bolten was awarded the Pfizer Global Achievement Award for his accomplishments as a Project Leader in metabolic hypertension and for development of a transcriptional biomarker-based PK/PD model critical in achieving first in human for a diabetic nephropathy target.
At the time of his recruitment to BioGenerator, Mr. Bolten held the position of Principal Scientist and Project Leader in the Exploratory Immunobiology group, where he led a reverse pharmacology collaboration with PTC Therapeutics focusing on post-transcriptional regulation of T cell cytokines and was the Research Project Leader for small molecule discovery program targeting an effector T cell subtype-selective receptor.
Having previously co-owned a company that designed and manufactured steel specialty products, after joining Searle, Mr. Bolten applied this knowledge to generate custom laboratory devices and modify existing automation platforms to increase efficiency and allow new processes in the areas of small molecule screening, gene expression, and RNA isolation. In addition to instrumentation, Mr. Bolten has extensive technical experience in cellular and biochemical assay development and implementation, functional genomics, molecular biology, and in vivo pharmacology.