About us
AuctuCel was founded to solve a problem every cell culture scientist knows: media that don't work.
Meet the founders
Dr Zach Pang PhD DBA CEng
Chief Scientific Advisor & Co-founder
Zach founded AuctuCel with a simple but powerful mission: to revolutionise how culture media are optimised. During his PhD at Imperial College London, he experienced firsthand the frustration of working with suboptimal culture media — wasting time, money, and effort trialing different brands before finally finding one that worked (at a high cost).
That pain point planted the seed for a lifelong mission: to make culture media development faster, smarter, and more accessible for scientists and biomanufacturers.
With a career spanning bioengineering, bioprocess modelling, and leadership at A*STAR, NUS, and NTU, Zach now combines bioinformatics and simulation tools to rethink culture media development. Instead of relying on trial-and-error, AuctuCel uses computational models to predict what cells need — making culture media design faster, smarter, and more cost-effective.
Dr Fhu Chee Wai PhD
Chief Executive Officer & Co-founder
Chee Wai's journey to AuctuCel began in the lab at the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore, where he spent months trying to keep fragile, patient-derived organoids alive — endlessly tweaking culture media one component at a time. The results were inconsistent and barely functional.
He wasn't alone; in conversations with other researchers, he kept hearing the same story. Later, at a contract research organisation, he saw biotech companies struggle with the exact issue during scale-up.
So when Zach came knocking with a bold idea and game-changing tech, Chee Wai jumped on board. The mission was clear: fix the culture media problem once and for all — and make life a whole lot easier for every scientist and biomanufacturer out there.