Andreas and Aris Persidis love to tackle big problems. As graduate students in the 1980s, the two brothers—a naval architect and a biochemist, respectively—would spend long nights knocking around ideas for how to engineer a better propeller or a sleeker keel, tangible challenges involving multiple factors and many data points.
A decade later, the brothers turned their sights toward the big problems of a new discipline, one where data were beginning to pile up. “We thought, ‘Why don’t we use engineering theories and techniques to attempt to address some of the unbelievably complicated questions in biomedicine?’” recalls Aris Persidis. “Someone had to do something like this, so we decided to give it a go.”
In 1996 the Persidis brothers cofounded Biovista, a biotech based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Over the next eleven years, using their engineering know-how, the duo developed a novel technology to answer a simple question: If we know ...
