Nature's Toolbox (NTx), a Rio Rancho-based life sciences company, announced Wednesday that it appointed a new CEO.
James "Jamie" Coffin, Ph.D., is the new CEO of the New Mexico company, effective Feb. 27. He replaces co-founder Alex Koglin, who left Los Alamos National Laboratory to launch Nature's Toolbox in 2015. Koglin now serves as president and chief science officer while sitting on the board of directors, according to a news release.
"NTx is doing some stuff that's off-the-charts cutting edge in the manufacturing space, especially around mRNA," Coffin told Albuquerque Business First. "I think there's a huge opportunity for this company and a huge opportunity for this area to really grow this lab and change the profile of New Mexico and the biotech space."
Coffin most recently served as the president and chief operating officer of Sema4, a health information company based in Stamford, Connecticut that provides advanced genomic testing. He left Sema4 in February of 2022. He's also held leadership roles at Dell and IBM Healthcare, according to NTx's news release.
The Connecticut company went public in mid-2021 and grew its employee base to over 1,000 people during Coffin's time there, according to the release from NTx. But the company cut several hundred jobs while closing its laboratories in Connecticut late last year. In January, it announced a name change to GeneDx, which is a Maryland-based company it acquired in 2022.
Coffin said that he wants to develop the leadership team at NTx to help the New Mexico company commercialize its technologies, which include mRNA manufacturing solutions and a bioinformatics platform called DruID.
"One of the challenges I think in New Mexico is bringing talent here," he said. "We're very interested in trying to find ways to build our relationships with local universities and with some of the states that are around here."
Coffin mentioned The Translation Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix as one potential partner for NTx in the future.
"We're really at a place right now where we're ready to launch some of our major products, they're ready to go," he said. "Bringing in a commercial team to really push the leading of this thing is going to make a big difference.
"That's what I've always been the guy to do — come in and sell technology to people."
NTx relocated from Santa Fe to Rio Rancho in 2020 and raised a $13 million Series A round in February of that same year. Anzu Partners, a national tech-focused venture firm, led that round.
