The primary appeal of biophysics for Chris Mathes, Chief Commercial Officer of AnaBios Corporation, is that “Biophysicists, especially the ion channel variety, get to see the behavior of these really important proteins in their natural environment — living cells! Not all disciplines can say this.” He adds, “I have really enjoyed the day-to-day variety and developing relationships with great people over the last 30 years.”
Chris Mathes grew up in Exeter, California, then a small town of about 6,000 people, in the San Joaquin Valley near the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. He enjoyed growing up in a small town, where he was able to get involved in many after-school activities as a child, “without the fear of being cut, as can happen with big schools,” he shares. As a kid, he was very interested in how the brain works. “Personal computers were appearing, and I imagined implanting computers in the body to override brain signals. I also had great science teachers in high school that spurred me on,” he shares. “Interestingly, I skipped extra science classes in junior high school to take wood shop for two years. In retrospect, the skills I learned in shop became useful for building and tinkering with patch clamp rigs in grad school, as a postdoc, and as an automated patch clamper.”
He attended Stanford University from 1984 to 1988, earning his bachelor of science degree in biological sciences. When he started his undergraduate studies he was planning to become a medical doctor, though he was not looking forward to taking the MCAT exams required for entrance into medical school. He decided to give basic research a try during his freshman year and never looked back.
After his graduation, Mathes began his PhD program in neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles. He fell in love with ion channels while taking Francisco (Pancho) Bezanilla’s physiology course at the university. “During the course, Pancho and Julio Vergara took us through all the Hodgkin and Huxley papers, and we modeled the action potential with the equation using a Mac,” he explains.
He completed his studies in 1995 and then took a postdoc position at Stanford University in the lab of William F. Gilly, studying potassium channels in squid giant fiber lobe neurons in collaboration with Clay Armstrong. He took a second postdoctoral position as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow with Reinhold Penner at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen, Germany. There he studied the regulation of the calcium release-activated calcium current (ICRAC).
Following his postdocs, Mathes joined Axon Instruments, where he served as project manager for the development of two of the first automated electrophysiology systems: the OpusXpress, an 8-channel oocyte system, and the PatchXpress, a 16-channel automated patch clamp with gigaseal recording. Working on getting the PatchXpress to market in a timely manner has been the biggest challenge of his career thus far. “The competition was fierce from other companies and the demand from pharma and biotech companies was high. In my role as project manager, I did not have direct reports which made leading the team challenging,” he shares. “However, I was blessed with a great team of software and hardware engineers. I fostered relationships with key members of these groups, and we worked hard to deliver a new product that really revolutionized drug discovery and cardiac ion channel safety testing.”
From 2005 to 2012, Mathes worked for Sophion Bioscience, Inc., during which time he established and managed the US subsidiary of Sophion Bioscience A/S, which is based in Denmark. He oversaw the set-up of the laboratory facility and helped guide the company, especially in the areas of assay development and collaborations.
Merritt Maduke, Associate Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University, first met Mathes at the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting in 1996. “We connected over our love of ion channels, the coolness of electrophysiology, and our shared experiences as scientists of faith,” she shares. The two first collaborated years later, when Mathes was at Sophion. “The team was instrumental in helping me understand high-throughput screening technologies. Later, when Chris moved to ChanTest (now Charles River Labs), he connected me with Yuri Kuryshev, which led to a collaboration to develop novel inhibitors of the CLC-2 ion channel. A manuscript describing the work has been accepted for publication in PNAS.” She admires his open spirit, saying, “Chris is kind, respectful, resourceful, positive, generous, encouraging, and friendly to all. I want to be like that!”
Mathes joined ChanTest Corporation as Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) in 2012, where he helped grow the business to sell to Charles River in 2014.
Mathes next served as CCO of Icagen, Inc., a company focused on ion channel and transporter drug discovery. He oversaw sales, marketing, and customer relations activities, as well as providing strategic guidance for the organization.
Since May 2018, he has been CCO of AnaBios Corporation, where he guides business development, marketing, and contributes to the company’s overall strategic direction. AnaBios is a human tissue company that does physiology experiments with tissues and cells obtained from ethically consented donors. “AnaBios is a unique biotech company and pre-clinical contract research organization,” he says. “This year we have been collaborating with a neuroscience team from Eli Lilly to develop a novel human spinal cord electrophysiology assay for drug discovery applications.”
He is focused now on the success of AnaBios. “There is such a strong need for translational assays in pre-clinical drug discovery. We are uniquely poised to help pharma and biotech develop better medicines in a timely fashion. In many ways human stem cells (i.e., iPSCs) have not lived up to the hope and hype of helping drug discovery,” he says. “AnaBios has stepped in to fill the gap with unique assays in pain research and cardiovascular disease using adult human primary cells. Down the road I plan to grow my consulting business to help pharma and biotech companies with ion channel and related projects.”
Mathes has been a member of the Biophysical Society throughout his career and has found the connections facilitated by his membership to be a big help along the way. “I have experienced Biophysical Society conferences from many different angles — presenter, attendee, and exhibitor. The Biophysical Society has been such an important part of developing my career for the past 30 years,” he says. “The relationships and connections have been extremely valuable at every step of my career, for example, meeting Reinhold Penner at conferences, then joining his lab as a postdoc, and interacting with industry scientists at the Axon and Sophion exhibits, which helped me to foster relationships that lead to future positions and opportunities.”