Will the Real SLIM Please Stand Up?

Will the Real SLIM Please Stand Up?

Melissa Sherman, PhD, founder and CEO of MOBILion Systems, shares the company’s journey over the last five years – from a sketch on a piece of paper to launching at ASMS 2021.

Can you tell me a little about your background and the founding of MOBILion Systems?

By training, I am a polymer chemist. But my corporate career, which has spanned the past 25 years, has focused on building businesses. I've always had a passion for the business side of things – and I’ve worked in a variety of areas, including technology, regenerative medicine, surgical products and the apparel industry (our startup was featured in Wired magazine in 2000 as a disruptive fashion business). I really love growing something from nothing, and this is part of the reason I was so excited to have the opportunity to build MOBILion.

I was introduced to the technology via IP Group, which is an early-stage technology investor that forms long-term partnerships with research institutes to help guide disruptive science in a commercially viable direction – from proof of concept to commercialization. I initially worked with IP Group to build their US business, and once we had the US team in place, we set out to scout disruptive technologies from a handful of universities and federal laboratories. And that’s where I first came across structures for lossless ion manipulation (SLIM) – the platform technology behind MOBILion’s first high resolution ion mobility (HRIM) product, MOBIE – which was being developed by Richard Smith and his research group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I wrote the investment thesis and told IP Group it was something I thought would have a tremendous impact on the life science tools industry. Our early stage financing milestones included sponsoring research to achieve technical proof of concept and building early prototypes. I was so excited by the possibilities of this technology, I left IP Group in 2017 and became the founding CEO of MOBILion – the rest is history.