Dave Messina
General Partner at iSelect Fund
San Diego, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDave Messina is a venture-backed entrepreneur and investor with 19 years of experience at the intersection of computational biology, diagnostics, and venture capital, currently serving as General Partner leading Pioneer's Future of Health Fund from San Diego. He co-founded and led Cofactor Genomics to Medicare reimbursement and ran a 30+ site national clinical trial, blending deep technical expertise in RNA and machine learning with operational rigor. A PhD-trained computational biologist and long-time BioPerl core contributor, he has hands-on experience shipping bioinformatics tools and improving core libraries used by the community. At Pioneer he sources and scales startups focused on extending healthy human lifespan, drawing on prior roles as Senior Venture Partner and YC founder/alum. Beyond investing, he advises startups and institutions (including Geneoscopy, the American Cancer Society, and educational boards), reflecting a rare combination of lab, product, and board-level experience. An understated strength is his continued open-source maintenance work—fixing documentation and parsing tools in BioPerl—showing a practical commitment to reproducible science.
20 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Biology, Bachelor of Science (BS), Biology at University of Illinois ChicagoMaster of Science (MS), Genetics, Master of Science (MS), Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. LouisDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computational Biology, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computational Biology at Stockholm University
Github Skills (5)
bioinformatics10
bioperl10
toolkits10
perl10
scripting9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
bioperl/bioperl-live
Sep 2006 - Mar 2014
Core BioPerl 1.x code
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:93 commits in 7 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Dave primarily contributed to the BioPerl 1.x code base by adding descriptions to code files, fixing typos, and updating documentation. The changes involved modifications to various Perl files within the BioPerl library. They also made updates related to the deobfuscator tool and a Bioperl script to parse RepeatMasker output and added support for WU-BLAST output.
bioperlbioinformaticsperltoolkit
DaveMessina/dave-test
Oct 2018 - Nov 2018
Contributions:1 push, 1 comment, 6 issues in 1 month
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