Garry Merry’s career in the life sciences started as a Medical Laboratory Technician at the local hospital in Ayrshire, Scotland. Following undergraduate studies at Glasgow College of Technology and a graduate degree in Protein Biochemistry from St. Andrews University, he joined Waters Associates as a Project Manager responsible for the sales and marketing of HPLC to the Life Science Market in the UK. After four years at Waters, Mr. Merry joined Beckman Instruments International based in Geneva, Switzerland in the role of European Sales & Marketing Manager for HPLC.
In 1984 Garry moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and joined Applied Biosystems. During his five years at ABI he rose to the position of Business Unit Marketing Manager and managed all aspects of marketing for both the Protein and the Separations Business Units, with combined revenues in excess of $150M. After five successful years with Applied Biosystems, he joined Millipore as Director of Marketing for their new Milligen/Biosearch Division.
In 1992 Garry started his own consulting and marketing services company to assist new start-up companies or established companies with no life science market experience in getting to market or entering the market with new technology. His clients have included: Arcturus Engineering (US), LI-COR (US), Becton Dickinson (US), MWG-Biotech (Germany), AromaScan (UK), Bioneer (Korea), Kurabo (Japan), Cybeles (Thailand), TerraSEp, Inc. and others.
During his time as an independent contractor, Garry was persuaded back into the corporate world first as CEO at MWG-Biotech, Inc from 1997-2000 and subsequently as VP Genomics and Proteomics at QIAGEN, where he was CEO of QIAGEN Operon and QIAGEN Genomics from 2001 to 2005. At QIAGEN he was responsible for a global service and R&D based business of approximately $48.0M with facilities in the US, Europe and Japan.
Immediately prior to joining twist in early 2015, Garry managed his own marketing services company which provided consulting and business development services to several successful early-stage synthetic biology and therapeutic discovery companies including Sloning Biotechnology GmbH, which was acquired by MorphoSys AG for €19M in early October, 2010. Other clients in the area of synthetic gene mutant library technology included Isogenica Ltd. (UK), Distributed Bio, LLC in San Francisco and Crelux GmbH in Martinsried, Germany. All told, Garry Merry has spent the past 8 years serving both the Synthetic Biology and the Therapeutic Discovery and Development segments.