Senior Researcher, TransDerm Inc.
President, Capsulent
TransDerm provides technology to deliver biologically active molecules to the skin, with emphasis on nucleic acid therapies for gene-silencing and, more recently, on skin-based vaccines. TransDerm is funded though private capital and public and private grants including N.I.H. and the Gates Foundation. Transderm has multiple proprietary delivery platforms including topical products and micron scale Protrusion Array Devices (PADs) capable of delivering nucleic acid payloads with subsequent cellular uptake and activity.
Capsulent delivers controlled-release compositions using proprietary charged-film microcapsule. This platform technology was initially developed for pharmaceutical applications, and provides useful skin-based delivery characteristics. However, these encapsulates have shown utility for a wide variety of industries including industrial and mass-market consumer product sectors. Capsulent was founded as a bootstrap startup in 2004.
Dr. Speaker was recently named as a recipient of a Bill and Melinda Gates Grand Challenges Explorations grant for work at TransDerm on a novel dry-stable patch-based malaria vaccine. He joined TransDerm in a consulting capacity in 2007, and is now on staff, while maintaining his position at Capsulent. At TransDerm, he led the development of a novel microneedle technology that has become the PAD system, and continues to develop this platform for new applications and toward mass-manufacturing. At Capsulent, he splits time between managing new business relationships and marrying the technology to new application prototypes, while manufacturing of fully developed products is handled at an East Coast affiliate firm. Prior to founding Capsulent, Dr. Speaker spent most of a decade in the semiconductor industry working in a variety of manufacturing engineering and technical roles at Applied Komatsu Technologies, an Applied Materials subsidiary, and then at dpiX, a Xerox PARC spin-off.
He holds a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Temple University, and a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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