How this startup CEO found his path to healthcare entrepreneurship

Gerry Sapienza ’21 MBA embarked on his Kellogg MBA journey after a decade in the military, planning to recruit for a career in tech. But a single lunch-and-learn presentation changed the course of his life.
Written by:
Kellogg
6 minute read

Topics:

Kellogg graduate Gerry Sapienza '21 MBA poses with his wife and three kids while they are on an outdoor hike in a forest.
“I still remember walking away from that presentation feeling awestruck by the potential of biology to change nearly every product we use today,” says Sapienza, pictured here with his family.

Gerry Sapienza ’21 MBA is the cofounder and CEO of Opera Bioscience, an early-stage startup based on research from Northwestern professor Danielle Tullman-Ercek at the NU Center for Synthetic Biology. Their next-gen technology uses bacteria to mass-produce proteins, a class of molecules that is fundamental to a huge range of industries and consumer products — from detergents to fabrics to medical applications and more.  

To date, OperaBioscience has raised $1 million in capital and recently won first prize at Kellogg’s Healthcare Entrepreneurship Business Plan Competition. Here, Sapienza shares how Kellogg helped him find his path into biotechnology and entrepreneurship. 

I started the Two-Year MBA Program at Kellogg in the fall of 2019. The Entrepreneurship at Kellogg office would host professors from the medical and engineering side of NU for lunch Tech Talks. I have always loved learning about science and technology, so I went to as many of these as possible. I met a trio of professors from the Center for Synthetic Biology (known as SynBio) at one of these who were recruiting MBA students to help their own startup. Though SynBio was a foreign language to me, I still remember walking away from that presentation feeling awestruck by the potential of biology to change nearly every product we use today. 

Though interested, I felt horribly unqualified to help them out: I had no technical background from undergrad, I had no relevant industry experience, having spent 10 years as a reconnaissance pilot in the U.S. Army, and I felt that I needed a traditional career that would support my family.  I originally stuck to a recruiting path in a more traditional tech career. But over the next year, I kept coming back to this synthetic biology world and talking about it with a friend who had also attended the same Tech Talk. She continually encouraged me to seek out opportunities in SynBio, even sending me names of companies that were doing really cool science and might have job openings. 

When I started the second year of the MBA program, I connected with several professors in the NU Center for Synthetic Biology. This is where I met Danielle, whose research is the basis of Opera Bioscience. She was incredibly generous with her time, spending somewhere around six to eight hours in the first few weeks of the school year teaching me all about her technology. I could immediately see the potential impact of her innovation. We could take proteins that were currently too difficult to produce or too costly to make and actually manufacture them economically.   

I was able to visit her lab during Thanksgiving break in 2020 to see what kind of research her students were doing in person. I spent two hours with Danielle and Julie Ming Liang ’23 PhD — now our third cofounder and chief science officer — mostly talking about how their research could translate into an actual company. Danielle got the technology into the Commercializing Innovations class, taught by innovation expert Lisa Dhar and entrepreneur Aaron Chockla ’18 JD, MBA. I enrolled in the class, and led a team of MBA and JD students as we investigated commercialization strategies, customer discovery, and built a business plan that would be feasible for her research.  

Opera Bioscience cofounders Julie Ming Liang and Gerry Sapienza stand in front of a poster of a futuristic illustration, with signage reading "Synthetic Biology Conference"
Opera Bioscience cofounders Julie Ming Liang ’23 PhD and Gerry Sapienza ’21 MBA at an industry conference.

This also marked a hard pivot to deep tech and entrepreneur focused activities at Kellogg. With two quarters to go I loaded my schedule, taking close to the maximum course load, I focused on healthcare and entrepreneurship, took a work study at another SynBio startup, and took the project through the semi-finals of NU’s VentureCat pitch competition. It was a busy stretch, but I leaned on family and friends for support. My wife gave me a framed “Grades Don’t Matter” quote to keep me focused on the important stuff, my Kellogg friends delivered nonstop encouragement, and my cofounders provided continued inspiration with a crash course in their incredible innovations.  

I remember telling my wife that I had not found anything in my MBA experience so far that had even remotely interested me as much as this project. It filled a need in me to have an impact on the world, which I had been missing ever since I left the Army. My wife was incredibly encouraging, though I did have to promise her that I’d be able to pay myself from this venture after a couple of years. So, I set aside the “traditional” career search and Danielle and I started Opera.  

Fast forward a few years and we now have a team of four working at Opera. We’ve raised nearly $1 million in mostly non-dilutive funding, including grants from a Fortune 100 company and the National Science Foundation, a sponsored fellowship from the Activate Organization, and venture funding from Northwestern’s N.XT Fund. We have our own lab in the Querrey InQbation Lab, a hub for early-stage, science-led startups that are commercializing Northwestern faculty research. We have a handful of customers that include drug developers, research service providers and environmental remediation companies. While we continue to support the development of other proteins on our platform, we are also developing our own protein products that are critical to R&D efforts in many different industries. To accelerate and scale this product development, we are doing a pre-seed fundraising round this summer. 

I look back to that first introduction to Synthetic Biology barely a month into my Kellogg experience and I can’t believe that I’ve made it this far. The day to day often seems like a struggle but I look back at the progress we’ve made and it makes me incredibly proud to be building a company that might someday make an outsized impact on the world. I‘m thankful that Kellogg provided the opportunity and support because I can’t imagine doing any other job. 

To learn more about the technology behind Opera BioScience, check out the Center for Synthetic Biology’s recent interview with professor Danielle Tullman-Ercek. And head to the Healthcare at Kellogg website to learn more about opportunities for students, alumni and corporate partners across all parts of the healthcare and biotech field.