Kevin Lustig

Kevin Donald Lustig (born 23 August 1963) is an American scientist and entrepreneur and founder of three life science companies: the pharmaceutical company Kalypsys in 2001; the online research marketplace Scientist.com (formerly Assay Depot) in 2007; and the non-profit lab incubator Bio, Tech and Beyond in 2013.

Lustig received an A.B. degree, magna cum laude, from the Section of Biochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology from Cornell University in 1985. He received an M.S. degree in Biochemistry from the University of Missouri, Columbia in 1991 and a PhD degree from Marc Kirschner’s laboratory in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco in 1997. Lustig carried out postdoctoral research in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School in 1997.

In addition to founding three life science companies, Lustig has published 25 original research articles and 4 book chapters and he is an inventor on 8 patents.

In 1993, Lustig and Andrew Shiau cloned the first member of a novel class of Purinergic receptors activated by extracellular ATP, a gene family that includes important drug targets.

In 1993, Lustig and Bruce Conklin invented the first of a series of G-protein chimeras that are still widely used by the pharmaceutical and biotech industry for drug screening.

In 1996, Lustig and Marc Kirschner invented a paracrine signaling assay and used it to identify Xnr1, which is part of a cell signaling pathway generating left-right asymmetry.

In 1997, Lustig and Randy King invented an in vitro expression cloning technology used to isolate substrates of kinases and proteases.

In 1997, Lustig invented a functional genomics approach to gene discovery and used it to identify a new member of the T-box family of transcription factors (Xombi aka VegT).

In 1999 and 2000, Lustig and colleagues showed that bile acids are physiological ligands for the farnesoid X receptor (FXR), invented synthetic liver X receptor (LXR) agonists, and demonstrated that both FXR and LXR ligands regulate cholesterol transport.

Lustig served as a research director at the biotechnology company Tularik, Inc. from 1997 to 2001, prior to it being acquired by Amgen in 2004. Tularik went public in December 1999 and is credited with helping to start the biotechnology stock bubble of 2000.

Lustig, Randy King, Pratik Shah and Peter Schultz founded the pharmaceutical company Kalypsys, Inc. in 2001. The company was a pioneer in using high throughput screening (HTS) for phenotypic drug screens. The company raised over $170M in venture capital funding. The HTS part of the business was sold to Panasonic in 2006.

Lustig, Chris Petersen and Andrew Martin founded the research marketplace Scientist.com (formerly Assay Depot) in 2007. The company launched its first public marketplace in September 2008. By June 2016, it also operated private research marketplaces for 10 pharmaceutical companies and the US National Institutes of Health.

Lustig and Joseph Jackson founded Bio, Tech and Beyond (BTNB), a non-profit life science incubator in Carlsbad, California in 2013; BTNB is a fully equipped shared research facility that makes it possible for one or a few scientists to start a life science company without significant funding.

In 2013, Lustig was named “San Diego’s Most Admired CEO” by the San Diego Business Journal. That same year he was also one of five national finalists for Entrepreneur magazine’s Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Lustig was twice recognized as one of the life science industry’s “100 Most Inspiring People” by PharmaVoice magazine in 2013 and 2014.