Tom Willis, Ph.D.

Tom has been an entrepreneur in the genomics industry for the past 20 years, during which time he founded and successfully exited two startups in the genomic tools and diagnostic space. Early in his career, Tom directed technology development efforts at the Stanford Genome Technology Center during the human genome project. He left Stanford in 2001 to found his first venture, ParAllele BioScience, where he served as the founding CEO. After two rounds of venture financing and the successful development and commercialization of high throughput genotyping tools, ParAllele was acquired by Affymetrix in 2005.

Tom founded his second venture, Sequenta in 2008. As CEO, he and his team developed and commercialized a sequencing-based platform for the assessment of the human immune repertoire. ClonoSEQ, the lead diagnostic indication, enables the assessment of residual disease in leukemia and lymphoma. This technology has been widely adopted by major cancer centers and established as the standard of care in the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines. In 2015 Sequenta merged with Adaptive Biotechnologies to build a public immune platform company.

Tom received his Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University after earning a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Yale University.