Over the past twenty-five years, he has co-founded and scaled four of them. The first, Agencourt Bioscience, became one of the largest commercial genomics services companies in the U.S., contributed to the Human Genome Project, and was acquired by Beckman Coulter in 2005. As a co-founder, Brendan ran operations across the business. Its spinout, Agencourt Personal Genomics, developed the SOLiD Next-Generation Sequencing platform, among the technologies that drove sequencing costs down by orders of magnitude, and was acquired by Applied Biosystems in 2006. He then co-founded Courtagen Life Sciences as President, bringing clinical genome sequencing to children with epilepsy, autism, and mitochondrial disease.
Today, as CEO of Medicinal Genomics (MGC), Brendan leads the company that has built the molecular detection platform and reference genomic database setting the safety standard for the cannabis industry. Under his leadership, MGC is extending that platform beyond cannabis into adjacent markets, food safety, dietary supplements, nutraceuticals, and botanical testing, where accurate microbial detection and species-level identification are increasingly essential. The team also founded CannMed, now the leading scientific summit in the cannabis sector.
His thesis is consistent across every company he’s built: when the science is rigorous enough, genomics stops being a research tool and becomes the infrastructure entire industries depend on.
Brendan holds a B.S. from Muhlenberg College and an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lally School of Management, where he was named Rensselaer Entrepreneur of the Year.
