Thank You, Melina: A New Chapter After 20 Years

As co-founder Melina Fan, PhD, transitions to Chief Scientific Advisor, we reflect on the problem she set out to solve 20 years ago, the community she helped build, and where she and Addgene go next.

On August 1, Melina Fan, PhD, stepped into a new role at Addgene. After 20 years, our co-founder is moving out of day-to-day leadership to become our Chief Scientific Advisor, a part-time position focused on science and strategy. It feels like the right moment to say something we don’t say often enough: thank you.

This isn’t goodbye; Melina isn’t going far. She’ll stay close to the questions she’s always cared about, and to the partners she’s worked with for years. This is a moment to celebrate what she’s built, and to look forward to what's next.

Figure 1: Addgene founders Kenneth Fan, Benjie Chen, and Melina Fan in 2014.

A problem worth solving

To understand Melina’s impact on Addgene, we have to go back to before Addgene existed. She was a graduate student in cell biology in Bruce Spiegelman’s lab, trying to identify the proteins that bound to a transcription factor involved in metabolism. To test whether those interactions were real, she needed plasmids, and getting them was nearly impossible. Of the roughly 20 she requested, about half never arrived. Of the ones that did, many took more than three months, or turned out to be the wrong construct.

She could have chalked that up to bad luck. Instead, she asked whether other scientists were running into the same wall. A survey of researchers around Harvard gave a clear answer: people were willing to share, but the logistics were getting in the way. A sample might sit lost in a freezer years after the person who made it had moved on. The details of how it was made might exist only in a notebook on a shelf. And shipping a material across borders was its own project entirely, one that had nothing to do with the science a lab actually wanted to do.

Melina already had a postdoc offer at Stanford, and since high school, she’d pictured a future in research. But the problem she’d run into stuck with her. The professor she was set to work with gave her something rare. She could take a year to chase the idea, with the reassurance that the opportunity would still be there if things didn’t pan out. That gave her room to take a risk. Shortly after finishing her PhD, she founded Addgene.

What Melina built at Addgene

Melina didn’t build Addgene alone, and she’s the first to say so. The founding team was three people, each bringing something different. Melina brought the biology. Her husband, Benjie Chen, a computer scientist, built the first systems and the original website. Her brother, Kenneth Fan, provided the business and finance chops needed to stand up a real organization.

The early days were modest. Addgene started in about 800 square feet of half-empty space Harvard wasn’t using in Kendall Square, with shared equipment, furniture pulled from hallways, and reliable freezers with backup power and alarms. From day one, every sample was barcoded and tracked, and every deposit stored in triplicate — two copies at Addgene, one backup in Rockville, Maryland — so a single point of failure could never mean losing a sample forever.

In the early days, building Addgene’s collection meant going lab to lab in person. They drove from one institution to the next, digging through notebooks and freezers to track down samples that labs often couldn’t find on their own. The legal side was its own hurdle. Material transfer agreements, or MTAs, which govern how shared materials can be used, were handled on paper and could take months to sign, so they rebuilt the process. Depositors signed once, requesters signed electronically, and a standard agreement handled the rest. What used to take three months could now take as little as a few minutes.

Then there was money. As a nonprofit, Addgene couldn’t raise venture capital, and its early grant applications to the NIH were all turned down. Funds were running low. The turning point came at a dinner in Cambridge, where a friend’s father, a university professor, pointed the team toward two viral packaging plasmids he predicted would become the most requested materials in the collection. He was right. Every year since, including last year, those same two plasmids have remained the most requested in the collection.

Figure 2: Addgene's first viral vector shipment in 2016.

A shift bigger than any one repository

Ask Melina what she’s most proud of, and the first answer is the shift in mindset Addgene helped spark. When the organization began, researchers were technically required to share their materials once they published. In practice, few did. And when they tried, it was often a hassle. Today, depositing your materials when you publish is the norm. Addgene wasn’t alone in making that shift — other open-science efforts came up around the same time — but together, they helped make openness the default.

As sharing caught on, Addgene’s reach grew with it. Addgene has now shared materials nearly 2.5 million times with researchers in 113 countries. When CRISPR arrived, Addgene was already established enough to help the community share those tools immediately. Years later, when COVID-19 hit and demand for those same tools surged, Addgene helped researchers get access when rapid collaboration mattered most. And because depositors had chosen to share from the beginning, that work also proved something important: sharing research materials and building a business around them don’t have to be at odds.

The people and the community

When it comes to building and growing the organization and its culture, Melina gives the credit to the Addgenies themselves: talented, driven, and always looking out for one another.

And above all, she points to the depositors. Their inventions, their willingness to share, their generosity in answering questions, writing guides, and helping other scientists succeed with their materials; that’s what makes the collection what it is. Addgene, she says, is just the platform that helps carry forward how good these scientists already are.

That instinct to keep the scientist at the center of every decision is exactly what our Executive Director, Chonnettia Jones, PhD, came back to in her own note to Melina:

“For more than two decades, you never faltered in keeping the scientist at the heart of every decision — not as a value written on a wall, but as a daily practice, visible in everything Addgene does and every standard we hold ourselves to. That is your legacy, and it belongs to every Addgenie who has carried it forward.”

—Chonnettia Jones, PhD, Executive Director, Addgene

Figure 3: Melina receives Addgene's Blue Flame Award in 2019.

The right time for a new chapter

So why step back now? For Melina, it comes down to confidence in the organization, and in the people running it. Twenty years is a big chapter, and Addgene is in good hands. She also sees value in a fresh perspective, especially on the science side, where the field moves fast and new ideas benefit from people who are closer to the bench than she’s been able to be lately. To her, this is the right moment for new voices to lead.

What comes next

In her advisory role, Melina will focus on science and strategy, staying close to the questions she cares about most. She also wants to keep hearing from the scientific community. Addgene exists because of a problem she once had at the bench, and she wants to know what problems researchers still run into today that Addgene might be able to help solve.

As for what comes after that, Melina is in no rush. She’s giving herself room to figure out what’s next, and she wants it to be work that means something to her.

Looking ahead

One analogy Melina keeps coming back to is that Addgene is a bit like a kid who’s grown up — educated, capable, ready to take its own steps in the world. Success, to her, means Addgene can thrive without depending on any one person, and can find its own way forward.

She’s optimistic about where science is headed, and about Addgene’s part in it, providing a dependable infrastructure that helps researchers across the life sciences do work they couldn’t do otherwise. Looking ahead, she hopes Addgene keeps making things easier for scientists and stays ready for whatever the scientific community needs solved next.

Thank you, Melina, for seeing the frustration so many scientists had quietly accepted and treating it like a problem worth solving. Thank you for 20 years of building a resource, a community, and a place where people care for each other while doing work that matters. We’re grateful for what you’ve given Addgene, and we’re glad you won’t be far.