Dr Brendan Darby, Chief Executive Officer of Marama Labs
Dr Brendan Darby, Chief Executive Officer of Marama Labs
Dr Brendan Darby, Chief Executive Officer of Marama Labs
Biography
Dr Brendan Darby is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Marama Labs. Brendan is originally from Ireland, where he competed his Bachelor’s in Applied Physics at Dublin City University. In 2012, Brendan moved to New Zealand, to undertake his PhD in single molecule surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) at Victoria University of Wellington. Brendan did his PhD in the lab of Professor Eric Le Ru, a world-renowned researcher in the field of spectroscopy and plasmonics (how metal nanoparticles interact with light). Brendan, along with co-founders Dr Matthias Meyer and Prof Le Ru, went on to spin out Marama Labs in 2019 from research developed during Brendan’s PhD. Brendan has led the company as CEO since and is now based in Dublin, Ireland where Marama’s commercial headquarters are located. Brendan is co-author on 11 peer reviewed papers in high ranking journals such as Nature Photonics and Nano Letters.
Interview
NanoSphere: Tell us a bit about yourself—your background, journey, and what led you to where you are today.
Brendan: I’m a physicist by training – I did my undergrad in Applied Physics in Dublin, and specialised in spectroscopy during my PhD, looking at detecting single molecules using lasers and metallic nanoparticles. I’ve always been fascinated by how the world works at the tiniest scales and by light itself, so it’s really fortunate that the best way to understand the world at these tiny (nano) scales is by using light to “see” what’s going on.
At the same time, I’ve always had a keen interest in business, economics and finance. My dad was an accountant, my brother runs his own business, and I’ve probably had every summer job possible (from butchering, to waiting tables, to dealing poker). Doing so many different jobs gave me an appreciation for the world of business, and most importantly, speaking with people. At the risk of creating a stereotype of scientists, I would say I’m an unusually extroverted scientist – my favourite place to be is outside the lab, speaking with people about their business problems and understanding how science may solve those problems.
During my PhD at the lab of Professor Le Ru (who is now Chief Science Officer at Marama Labs), we developed an optical technique that overcame some longstanding challenges with existing optical instruments, allowing us to measure what was once thought impossible. We immediately knew this technology would have wide reaching benefits for scientific applications, but actually turning that into reality from an academic lab was not clear.
This is where my passion for business came in – having finished up writing my PhD, I was in a perfect position to go out into the real world and speak with businesses about their problems, to understand if there was a need and pain point that our technology could solve and ultimately, if they would pay for that solution. What was crucial during this period was to be able to balance having the technical understanding of what the technology could do with understanding the needs of end users in the context of their business. I quickly discovered that technology commercialization was something I was both good at and really enjoyed – which soon led to the formation of the company, raising of an initial seed round and becoming CEO of Marama Labs.
It has been an incredible journey, going from deep, fundamental scientific research to leading a 20 person company of incredibly talented people across 3 countries and now to building solutions for the world’s leading therapeutic developers, all based on science developed during my PhD.
NanoSphere: Marama Labs originated from a multidisciplinary academic research and has evolved into a venture-backed company translating deep-tech innovation into real-world applications. Can you walk us through how CloudSpec transitioned from an early scientific concept into a commercially viable platform? Along that journey, what were the key technical or strategic trade-offs you had to navigate—particularly as you expanded toward life science and nanomedicine applications—and how do you define meaningful success as you establish Marama Labs in this space?
Brendan: As I mentioned above, CloudSpec originated from deep fundamental scientific research at Professor Eric Le Ru’s Raman Lab in Wellington, New Zealand. We were using high powered lasers to look at how molecules interact with metal (gold and silver) nanoparticles, and to understand those phenomena from a fundamental physics perspective. While I’m the first to acknowledge – and actually highlight – that this work had absolutely no commercial end-point in mind, such research spanned many fields of science including electromagnetism, optics, spectroscopy, surface science, molecular modelling, colloid chemistry and so on. As such, our group had both a deep fundamental understanding of how nanoparticles behave and a practical set of skills to measure them, meaning we were well positioned to take the resulting technology to the world as a real product.
When we invented the technology which now underpins the CloudSpec, we knew it would and could be used across many fields of science and industrial applications, because we were very aware of how ubiquitous spectrometers are in analytical testing. But where to start on this journey was the conundrum and there were many questions – do we jump straight into biopharma (where spectroscopy is widely used) or do we start somewhere else? How do we find our end users? What will they be looking for, an early prototype or a finished product? How do we get money to start? Do we license the technology or start a company? This was where the commercialisation journey started and is how our first industrial application for CloudSpec emerged in the winemaking industry. New Zealand is a leading wine producer, with many innovative companies utilizing technology in their production processes. Speaking with New Zealand’s top wine companies, we identified a large unmet need of measuring wine quality during the earliest stages of production, which the CloudSpec could do more quickly and easily than existing methods. The wineries we spoke with were eager to try the technology, and after successful pilot trials in 2017 and 2018 where we deployed prototypes of the CloudSpec on site at partner wine laboratories, we spun the company out in 2019 via a pre-seed round. Marama Labs was now a commercial entity, with a plan to launch CloudSpec to first the wine market, and then further afield to biopharma and other fields testing high value liquids.
The key technical and strategic trade offs in a fast moving, deep tech start up are always along the same lines, i.e. “what is good enough to ship?”. In traditional software startups, there is the old adage of “if you weren’t embarrassed by the product, you didn’t ship early enough”. This isn’t completely true when it comes to hardware, and particularly analytical hardware – customers are using your instrumentation to generate an answer, and that answer will be used to inform a key business decision. So even when shipping prototypes during pilot trials, there is a base level of expectation from the customer that (1) the product will actually work for the period of the pilot (it may not be the most elegant to use or operate, but it needs to work) and (2) the results the product outputs are correct within a certain level of accuracy. This means that there’s a very fine balance between what is good enough, what’s not good enough and what is unnecessary.
As we have matured as a company, our team has become very good at deciding what is “good enough” while delivering a product that impresses our customers and provides a very high level of analytical rigour. In nanomedicine and life sciences, the great thing is that customers have a very good understanding of what is required from an analytical measurement, because of the stringent criteria in therapeutic development. This makes it very clear for our team what it is our products need to provide to meet our customers’ needs, for example what is the accuracy, precision and measurement time needed. Once we can meet these criteria, and package the product into an easy- to-use platform with intuitive software, we know we’re going to have a happy customer.
In terms of success, there is nothing more telling than when your customers are speaking about your product to others in the field, sharing how it helps them day-to-day to streamline their drug development processes. Recently some of our customers have shared their positive experiences with CloudSpec on their own webinars – this gives me real pride that what we have developed is providing real value to our end users. Ultimately, success for Marama in the nanomedicine space is that we have played a (small) part in compressing the time it takes our customers to get these life changing therapies to market.
NanoSphere: CloudSpec’s scatter-free absorption technology directly addresses a fundamental limitation of traditional UV/Vis by enabling rapid, accurate quantification in highly scattering systems like LNPs—without sample disruption or complex assays. In mRNA-LNP development and manufacturing, where analytical bottlenecks still slow down workflows, this represents a significant shift in capability. How do you see this type of technology being integrated into existing analytical workflows? Where do you believe it can deliver the most immediate impact—early development, process optimization, or quality control?
Brendan: The CloudSpec platform has been built with the entire LNP development workflow in mind, from early stage discovery through to process development (and soon quality control). Because the CloudSpec assays do not require lysing of LNPs to measure RNA payloads, formulation scientists can not only reduce the time needed for characterization of LNPs, but have higher confidence in the values they are getting from their assay. This dual advantage means that formulation scientists at early stage discover and in process development can directly integrate CloudSpec as part of their standard tool box of analytical assays when developing and scaling up formulations.
CloudSpec’s currently is having the most impact at the early stages of formulation development, where rapidly obtaining reliable values for total RNA payload, encapsulation efficiency and ligand concentrations allows formulations to progress to the next stage of development, without waiting for multi-step processes like the Ribogreen assay. In the near future, the superior precision of the CloudSpec assays over existing assays will see major benefits in process development and QC contexts, where assay repeatability and inter-operator reproducibility are paramount.
NanoSphere: If there’s one key message or insight you’d like to share with readers about the future of nanomedicine, what would it be?
Brendan: The success of nanomedicine rests on a multidisciplinary approach – we came to the LNP as physicists with deep experience in light scattering spectroscopy, which has resulted in an entirely new, faster and more precise way to characterize LNPs. I believe this concept of bringing together disparate fields of science with fresh perspectives will help solve the field’s most pressing problems and advance RNA therapeutics together.