Cathy Tie is a Canadian bioinformatician and entrepreneur known best as a founder of Ranomics, a genetic screening company based in San Francisco.
Background and education
Tie's family moved from China to Canada when she was four years old. Her father has a master's degree in chemical engineering, but she describes both parents as "entrepreneurs." Growing up in Mississauga, Ontario, she attended the Glenforest Secondary School. At 15, she worked on an immunology project with researchers at the University of Toronto, work that was published the next year in the Canadian Young Scientist Journal as a single-author manuscript. Further research using yeast as a gene variant model was published by a larger team in 2018. During her first year as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, Tie worked at Mount Sinai Hospital, in the genetic research laboratory of Frederick Roth. After hearing about a competition for a biotech startup, she teamed up with Leo Wan, a graduate student in Roth's lab, to create a business plan for a genomics start-up. They later presented their business plan to IndieBio, an accelerator run by SOSV, who gave them $100,000 of funding. Tie took a leave of absence in 2014 after less than a year of college to work on the project in San Francisco with IndieBio. In 2015, Tie was one of only four Canadians to win a Thiel Fellowship, which encourages college undergraduates to leave college and instead further their education by building a startup company.
Ranomics
Tie founded Ranomics as its CEO in 2015. In a JLabs profile, Tie explained that the company's focus was to investigate variants of unknown significance that caused genetic tests to fail or misdiagnose patients. Ranomics worked for external genetic testing firms in a business-to-business arrangement to analyze oncogene mutations. Tie and her partner eventually partnered lead product VariantFind with Science Exchange to provide variant analysis on their online platform.
Awards
Tie was a 2015 Thiel Fellow and a 2018 Forbes Healthcare "30 under 30". She and co-founder Leo Wan won a $100K USD incubator mentorship through SOSV's incubator IndieBio. Her company was chosen as a Kairos Society 50 in 2017. She was named a partner in SF-based Cervin Ventures in 2018.
