About List Labs

List Labs was founded in 1978 by Linda Shoer. List Labs’ heart is in the science and the discovery of innovative reagents. In the last four decades, we have served the global research community by offering a catalog of over 100 bacterial reagent products including toxins, peptides, antibodies, and lipopolysaccharides.

List Labs also offers a variety of services to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, start-ups, and government organizations ranging from technology transfer to process development and scale up to cGMP manufacturing for Phase 1 and 2 clinical supply. We have expertise with aerobes, anaerobes, and spore formers, which are BSL1 to BSL3 capable and are approved for use of Select Agents and Toxins. We have GMP capabilities to manufacture bacterial products and proteins from our catalog or through custom offerings. In addition, List Labs has a wealth of experience in cGMP manufacturing of Live Biotherapeutic Products (LBP).

Legacy of our founder Linda Shoer:

After moving to California in the mid-1970s, Dr. Linda Shoer shared dreams and possibilities with her “advisors”… her sisters Dr. Ruth Rappaport, a vaccinologist at Wyeth Laboratories, and Dr. Patricia Goldman-Rakic, a neuroscientist at Yale University. List Biological Laboratories, Inc. was founded in 1978, when Dr. Shoer and her husband, Dr. Steven Johnson, funded it with a personal loan on their home. With an entrepreneurial spirit, she started and ran her company to benefit her scientific community, much as her father, Irving Shoer, had run his small businesses while she was growing up in Peabody, Massachusetts with her two sisters and mother, Jennie Shoer. Her strengths were her intellect, education & training, and infectious energy. After receiving her baccalaureate in chemistry from Simmons College (Boston, MA, 1963), Dr. Shoer earned her doctorate in biochemistry at Boston University (1972), and followed this with extensive post-doctoral training at three institutions: Brandeis University (Waltham, MA), Boston University School of Medicine and University of California (Santa Cruz, CA).

Dr. Shoer was committed to developing unique high-quality products that serve a scientific need. She produced virulence factors of pathogens that allowed scientists to harness the activities of toxins and other bacterial antigens for their research. Examples are:

  • Cholera toxin, her first product, is sought after by those doing research in signal transduction and by others using the toxin’s B subunit to label and visualize neurons. Dr. Shoer’s List Labs was the first commercial supplier of this toxin.
  • Pertussis toxin is used by researchers in developing and improving vaccines as well as in creating models of autoimmune diseases, such as experimental allergic encephalitis (EAE).
  • LPS is supplied to be used as a standard in test kits that detect unwanted endotoxin contamination in drugs and reagents. Scientists also use LPS to study inflammation.

Dr. Shoer was the only employee for the first three years, after which she hired an employee or added a piece of equipment periodically, with the goal of gradually growing her business, providing steady employment for her staff, and valuable reliable research products. In 1989, she particularly enjoyed planning a facility renovation and purchasing and installing our first “real” fermenter, a beautiful stainless steel Chemap with steam-in-place sterilization and automatic pH control. The company was able to add square footage as needed by taking over adjacent suites in the industrial park. Catalog products grew steadily, and she began to perform custom development and manufacturing projects. In the 1990s, Dr. Shoer lead List Labs in process development, scale-up, and manufacture of a very popular injectable commercial product to smooth facial wrinkles.

In 1999, Dr. Shoer passed away at the young age of 57, leaving her legacy, her company, in the care of her two sisters (both now passed), her collaborator Dr. Hans Bigalke and three trusted employees, Dr. Karen Crawford, Dr. Linda Eaton, and Ms. Debra Booth; all are now retired and remain on the Board of Directors. The company Dr. Shoer built still flourishes and is now run by a strong team of employees, who value our commitment to quality and the tight employee community.

Dr. Shoer’s presence is still strongly felt throughout the company. In an era of takeovers and transition, List Labs is true to its founding focus. Today, the catalog offers over 100 products including toxins, peptides, antibodies, and lipopolysaccharides. Many of our employees have worked together for decades. In 2008, we built out new laboratories, complete with state-of-the-art equipment, enabling us to work with toxins using the appropriate containment and to capitalize on the growing demand for contract manufacturing of cGMP bacterial products, including Live Biotherapeutic Products (LBP), for clinical trials.

Management Team

Karen Crawford, PhD, Board Chair

Dr. Crawford has over thirty years’ experience in biotechnology. She joined List Labs in 1989 and served as President from 1999 to 2020. She has an extensive background in bacterial fermentation of aerobes and anaerobes, toxin production, and purification. Dr. Crawford led the List Labs team to build and commission a cGMP parenteral toxin drug manufacturing facility where she supervised cGMP production and upstream processing of a clostridial toxin. During her appointment as President of List Labs., Dr. Crawford managed projects providing quality-controlled anthrax and botulinum toxins to a resource repository. In addition, she directed the development of numerous products including Clostridium difficile and Bacillus anthracis toxins and both the Corynebacterium diphtheriae toxin and the CRM mutant. Dr. Crawford earned her BA in Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and her PhD in Molecular Biology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. As of June 1, 2020, she becomes the Board Chair of the Company and Board of Directors.

Stacy Burns-Guydish, PhD, President

Dr. Burns-Guydish has over twenty years’ experience in transformative biotechnology applications with pathogenic, therapeutic, and industrial relevant microbes. She developed break-through technologies for bacterial production of a biochemical resulting in intellectual property and patents, scaled up a strict anaerobic fermentation to 100,000L, and developed bioluminescent sensors for real time in vivo imaging. She joined List Labs in 2016 and has directed the development and manufacturing of several different live biotherapeutic and toxin therapeutic drug products for Phase I and II clinical trials. She served as the Vice President of Biotherapeutic Development and Manufacturing contributing to List Labs strategic plans and overseeing upstream and downstream process development, scale-up, and cGMP manufacturing of client and List Lab products. Dr. Burns-Guydish earned her PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from Baylor College of Medicine and completed her postdoctoral training at Stanford University School of Medicine. As of June 1, 2020, she takes over the role of the President of the Company.

Maggie Tam, Chief Financial Officer

Ms. Tam joined List labs as Chief Financial Officer in March 2016. She has twenty plus years of executive global financial management experience in consumer, software and biotech industries, managing finance, operation, international expansion, raising capital as well as merger and acquisitions activities. She has a BS in Finance and MBA from Santa Clara University, SEP certificate from Stanford University, and holds a California CPA license. At List labs, she applies her extensive financial and operation experience to lead the accounting, FP&A, IT, facilities and operation departments to support the rapid growth of the company in recent years.

Nancy Shine PhD, Chief Scientific Officer

Dr. Shine has been with List Biological Laboratories since 1999 and has been Director of Research and Development since 2007. Her background is in protein chemistry and she has applied that knowledge to the toxins produced at List with a particular focus on the botulinum and anthrax toxins. During her tenure she has designed peptide substrates for various analytical purposes. She designed FRET peptide substrates for four botulinum toxin serotypes (BoNT). She was granted a patent for the substrate specific for BoNTA marketed as SNAPtide® and developed protocols using these peptides for inhibitor screening and detection of low picogram amounts of BoNTA in complex matrices. She also developed an assay to evaluate both receptor binding and enzymatic activity of BoNTA using the SV2 receptor and SNAPtide®. She designed FRET peptides, marketed as MAPKKide®, for Bacillus anthracis lethal factor. She received a patent for a fluorescently labeled substrate, MAPKKide® Plus, for the rapid, sensitive and specific detection of anthrax lethal factor in plasma. Dr. Shine’s current work includes development and qualification of ELISAs, HPLC for purity determination, a microplate assay to detect residual protein contaminants, and a specific activity assay for drug product using a FRET substrate. She received her PhD in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of California, San Francisco.

Kent Davis, Senior Director of Manufacturing

Kent Davis has over twenty years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry including cGMP platform technologies for monoclonal antibodies, bacterial proteins and live biotherapeutics for Phase I, II and III clinical trials. His background includes process development, technical transfer, manufacturing and operations. Kent serves as a subject matter expert in downstream processing techniques including fermentation harvest (dead-end filtration, TFF and centrifugation), chromatography and UF/DF. He helped to pioneer the design and development of sterile/single-use/disposable supplies and associated equipment for use in the manufacturing of a potential commercial product for a patient-specific immunotherapy. Kent has been with List Labs since 2009, and he currently serves as the Director of the Production Department including lab support, microbiology, fermentation, purification and process development teams. Mr. Davis earned his BS in Chemical / Biochemical Engineering from UC Davis.

Gary Henderson, Director of Business Development and Sales

Mr. Henderson joined List in June 2020, bringing over 25 years of biotech sales and business development experience to List Labs. He has introduced disruptive automation technology to the clinical diagnostics market, designed custom consumables for High Throughput automation, and structured contracts with some of the largest commercial and research organizations in the world. He takes tremendous satisfaction in the construction and completion of a well-planned project that propels his customer forward on their trajectory of success. He majored in Business and Economics at CSUH.