Catherine Cifuentes-Rojas builds Ginkgo’s RNA therapeutics platform
Who is Catherine Cifuentes-Rojas?
Catherine Cifuentes-Rojas, Ph.D., is Director and Lead for Genetic Medicines and Biologics at Ginkgo Bioworks in Boston. She directs a cross-functional teams and oversees multi-million-dollar federal programs, including work funded by BARDA and HHS. Her job sits at the point where RNA biology, immunology, AI-design and lab automation meet, a combination that is becoming harder to find in one person as biotherapeutics companies grow more technical.
Before Ginkgo, she spent time at Sail Biomedicines, first as a senior scientist in translational medicine and platform development, then as Associate Director of Discovery Biology and Interim Head of In Vivo Pharmacology. That progression, from bench science to running a preclinical pipeline, is the backbone of how she thinks about building programs today.
How did she get from Colombia to a Harvard lab?
Cifuentes-Rojas grew up in the foothills of the Andes, the daughter of two elementary school teachers. She finished high school at 15, as class valedictorian and a regional Math Olympiad winner. Because she was too young for university, she spent a year teaching English in public schools first.
Her academic path ran through Universidad del Valle, where she earned a B.S. in Clinical Microbiology, and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, where she completed an M.S. in Cancer Immunology and later taught as Assistant Professor of Immunology. She then moved to Texas A&M University for a Ph.D. in Genetics, focused on RNA biochemistry and functional genomics.
From there she went to Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she worked as a postdoctoral fellow and later as Assistant in Molecular Biology. Her research on long non-coding RNAs earned her the National Academy of Sciences Cozzarelli Prize in Biological Sciences in 2020, along with anF32 NRSA fellowship and a NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award.
What does a genetic medicines platform actually involve?
At Ginkgo, Cifuentes-Rojas’s role covers more than one program at a time. She leads R&D strategy across several concurrent biotherapeutic efforts, spanning RNA therapeutics, cell therapies, and biologics. Part of her initiative has been building the company’s internal RNA therapeutics platform from the ground up, along with pooled and RNA high-throughput validation systems that let a small team screen far more candidates than manual methods allow.
That validation infrastructure matters because biotherapeutics discovery is a volume problem as much as a biology problem. A target that looks promising in a handful of assays can behave very differently once it moves into pooled screens against dozens of variables. Building systems that catch that early, before a program burns through a year of resources, is a large part of what her group does.
Why does she call herself a translator between disciplines?
Cifuentes-Rojas describes much of her recent work as bridging traditional immunology with computational and machine learning teams. Genetic medicines programs increasingly depend on AI-guided design tools and lab robotics, and the scientists running the wet-lab assays don’t always speak the same technical language as the engineers building the models.
She has approached that gap through what she calls reverse mentorship, sitting down regularly with junior bioinformaticians and computational designers to learn their tools directly rather than delegating that education. It is a habit that comes from her own path: she taught herself English and French as a child to read literature in its original language, and she has treated technical fluency the same way as an adult, as something you acquire by doing the work yourself rather than waiting for a summary.
What has running federal programs taught her about scale?
Managing BARPA and HHS-funded work is a different discipline from running an academic lab or a smaller biotech team. Federal programs come with fixed milestones, external review, and less room for the kind of open-ended exploration that basic research allows. Cifuentes-Rojas has had to translate scientific judgment into deliverables that satisfy program officers while still protecting the integrity of the underlying biology.
That balance, between structured governance and scientific honesty, shows up in how she runs her team day to day. She maps 3- to 5-year platform visions, such as automating RNA workflows, and breaks them into monthly deliverables her group can track against transparent dashboards. The scale is different from her Harvard lab or her time at Sail Biomedicines, but the underlying question she asks hasn’t changed: does the data support moving forward, or not.
Where does this fit in biotherapeutics right now?
RNA therapeutics and genetic medicines are still a young field relative to small-molecule drugs, and much of the infrastructure for testing candidates at scale is being built as companies go. Cifuentes-Rojas’s work at Ginkgo sits inside that build-out, focused less on any single molecule and more on the systems that let a platform company evaluate many molecules at once. That kind of infrastructure work rarely makes headlines, but it shapes how fast a field like genetic medicines can actually move.
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