Fluidic Sciences has officially reached its first anniversary! To mark this milestone, we sat down with Dr. James Wilkinson, CEO of the company, to reflect on the past year and hear what exciting developments lie ahead.
The most memorable moments for me are visiting our customers – see what they’re doing with the technology, see the consumables and the instruments delivering data and being used to further their research.
Dr. James Wilkinson: Hello, my name is James Wilkinson. I am the CEO of Fluidic Sciences. I am a protein chemist by background and have spent a career involved with new innovative technologies and taking those from concept to commercialisation.
Interviewer: What inspired the founding of Fluidic Sciences?
Dr. James Wilkinson: So Fluidic Sciences was founded approximately a year ago by a small group of mainly local investors. They had come across this technology called Microfluidic Diffusional Sizing, which was struggling to get off the mark after a few false starts. This is the technology that we believe makes biophysics more accessible – just an extremely easy to use technology, very quick to make some measurements, has a good pedigree. It spun initially out of the Cambridge Chemistry department and the company was founded to commercialise this technology and therefore bring this technology out towards the customers.
Interviewer: And looking back, what has been the most memorable moment in your journey so far?
Dr. James Wilkinson: So I think most memorable for me is visiting some of our customers. We have a reasonable install base of our customers and being able to go and visit them – see what they’re doing with the technology, see the consumables and the instruments delivering data and being used to further their research – has been really great to see.
Interviewer: What achievements from the past year are you most proud of?
Dr. James Wilkinson: First year of any company – I think there’s always a lot of firsts and I think that’s probably the things that we’re most proud of. Exhibiting at the first conference back in January – it’s a great achievement for the team, bringing a lot of different departments together. Our first instrument deliveries, of course, our first hires into key departments. So yeah, a lot of firsts in the company.
Interviewer: What’s your favourite part about working with this team every day?
Dr. James Wilkinson: So I think the role of CEO is quite an interesting one because it’s not a specialised role as such and you rely heavily on your team for all of the areas of the business that you might not be particularly expert in. So for me it’s about learning from that. We’ve put together a really good team expertise in a whole range of areas and guiding that process along but also learning from the team members is always a really exciting part.
Interviewer: What exciting developments can we look forward to in the coming year?
Dr. James Wilkinson: So over the next year we have quite a range of developments coming. We have some new products that we’ll be launching and then also some new features onto our existing instrumentation. All of this is guided by the philosophy that we want to make this a lot easier to use for customers. So one of the big advantages of our technology is it is already easy to use, and this gives customers access to biophysical parameters in a way that is not necessarily as easy to get to without our sort of technology. So it opens this space up for a wider range of customers and we’re adding to that.
So more and more products, more and more features to enable that access and make it even easier.
Interviewer: What message would you like to share with the customers?
Dr. James Wilkinson: Thank you for being our customers. We really appreciate you and value you. We want to find out what you’re doing – I think it’s the most important part. We don’t want to just receive your orders for consumables, ship them out. We would love to know what you’re using it for, what you’re having successes for, and the more communication we can have between you and us, enables us to design the products and develop the products in the future for your future needs.
Interviewer: And my last question is, what would you like to say to the team at Fluidic Sciences?
Dr. James Wilkinson: Again, thank you for being such a great team. We have a wide range of expertise across the business, and I think we’ve done a remarkable job with a very small team. I’ve always worked with small companies. One of the reasons I like small companies is it’s, by definition, varied. There’re lots of tasks to do. So the team has to step up and get involved with things that might not necessarily be their first port of call. It’s great and I hope we can continue doing that in the future.
Interviewer: Thank you for speaking with us today, James!
About Fluidic Sciences
It’s not just the proteins that make life, it’s the interactions among them. Here at Fluidic Sciences, we make protein interaction analysis easy and robust by developing transformative in-solution technologies and accessible instruments that help scientists quickly and accurately understand how proteins truly interact.