BCBusiness

April 2018 30 Under 30

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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BCBUSINESS.CA ApRIL 2018 BCBusiness 41 lIfE SToRY: Dara Djafarian was accepted to medical school but opted for business instead. "As much as I love medicine, I always enjoyed the op- portunity to bring businesses and ideas to light and make them commercially viable and real and interesting and ap- plicable to society," he explains. When Djafarian was five, he and his sister, Lily, moved with their parents from London, England, to Vancouver's North Shore. Vancouver is home to Djafarian's cousins and uncles on his mother's side, including Shahram and peter malek, principals of millennium Development Corp. Djafarian attended Collingwood School in West Vancouver, then mcgill University for a bachelor of arts and sciences specializing in biomedical sciences, before returning to the U.K. to complete a master of technology entrepreneurship at University College London in 2012. Back in Vancouver, Djafarian became an associate at Vanedge Capital partners Ltd. and met a group of scientists and investors involved in a UBC research project that needed commercialization. he joined Creatus Biosciences in 2015 as director of busi- ness operations, becoming president and a board member the following year. THE boTToM lINE: Creatus Biosciences is a biotechnology com- pany that has genetically engineered a new species of micro-organism to produce compounds from xylose sugars with applications in such industries as biofuels and food additives. Creatus has filed eight patents in the U.S. and other countries and obtained $3 million in funding plus grants and credits. –F.S. D A R A D J A f A R I A n president creatus biosciences inc. age: 29 thirty unDer thirty

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