He has spent his entire adult life helping his communities. Now, as head of Parish-based BioSpherix, he looks to help the world
By Stefan Yablonski
Syed Ahmed Mustafa has spent a lifetime helping those in his community.
“In April of 2024, a private equity group out of the UK bought BioSpherix,” he said. “I joined them the next day.”
Now, the 56-year-old Penfield resident said he is looking forward to helping the world.
“I am a life-long New Yorker, having grown up in Corning and then moving to Penfield in the late 1990s, where my wife and four adult children still reside,” he said. “I was born in Bloomington, Delaware, actually.
“My family was in Corning, New York. My dad was accepting his job at Corning; my mom was with him. They were flying back home and I almost came out on an airplane. I was almost born on a Piedmont aircraft.”
A few days after birth, they were back in Corning. “So I tell people I am a Corning baby. I bleed Corning blue,” he said.
A lifetime of service
“I have dedicated 34 years — my entire adult life — I was a volunteer firefighter, became a captain and was in EMS for years. I am very proud of all the things I’ve accomplished,” he said. “Fifty-six babies delivered, well over 150 cardiac arrest saves, started an ambulance service, ran a paramedic service, built a building. I am very, very proud of what I did.
“Now I am enjoying life without it. For 34 years, my phone went off 10 times a day. Now it doesn’t and I get to focus on something that I think is also going to change the world on a much larger scale.”
“I made a big difference to people in my community for a long time. Now I get to, through BioSpherix, make a difference to the world. The products that we sell and support that we give researchers and manufacturers will bring cures to cancer. Will bring cures to Alzheimer’s. Will bring curses to hemophilia. We are changing things on a global scale and that to me is very exciting,” he added.
He became a pilot when he was 16 — “before I could drive.”
“My dad had always enjoyed recreational flying. I used to commute when we lived in Rochester; I’d fly my own plane to Rhode Island every week. We sold the plane when we had our fourth child and we bought boats — so that is how we got the family into boating,” he said. “I’m ready to start flying again. Maybe this winter I’ll start flying again, we’ll see.”
Mustafa started an ambulance service, the Webster Emergency Medical Service, to work with the northeast. The town chose to not fund that ambulance service.
“It was all closed in April. The building is for sale, the building we just built two years ago after 20 years of fundraising,” he said.
It was a case where bias and prejudice overtook logic, according to Mustafa.
“The former town board and superintendent were all with us. A new supervisor came in and bias and prejudice of race and religion ended things.
“He told my board that they would not negotiate with us until I resigned. My board was like ‘why would Ahmed resign when he started the ambulance service. He did all the work for it.’ My board said ‘we’re sorry we’re not giving in to that.’ He very openly colluded with a neighboring ambulance service and put us out of business,” Mustafa said.
He grew up in Corning with his parents and his sister.
“Survived the flood of 1972, started my first business in Elmira, New York, when I was 15 with help from my dad. We opened a One Hour Foto Lab and ran that through high school and college and then a few years after that; 10 years total,” he said.
“It was the first One Hour Foto Lab within 100 miles between Rochester and Syracuse. The mall had brought in another company that was competing and I got out. At the time I was working at an optical fiber business in Corning. I started in 1990 with Corning as an inside salesperson and then shortly thereafter became a sales person for Europe; ran Europe for four or five years.”
He left Corning and started another business, “took a $100,000 investment and turned it into a $20 million company.”
Fun things
“I’ve done a bunch of other things,” he said. “I’ve sold medical devices. I’ve sold software services for Rosetta Stone and worked in education and bio-tech fields. I’ve done a lot of fun things!
“BioSpherix has a great history. It’s been around for more than two decades.
Randy Yerdon was the local owner and founder. He realized there was a better way to work with live cells.”
BioSpherix, a cutting-edge biotech company, is Parish’s largest employer. It is working with scientists around the globe to impact medical outcomes forever.
Located at 25 Union St., it creates systems that help researchers and companies working in cell and gene therapy get better results from their cells because they remain in an environment most closely resembling the in vivo systems.
As married as married can be
“We just celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary. We met in school; her brother and I were classmates. So I’ve known Karin since she was probably 15 or 16 years old. We were married many, many years later,” he said. “She was my sister’s best friend and my best friend’s little sister. So I always thought of her as a sister. When we finally announced our engagement, it was so funny — everyone was like, ‘what took you so long?’ Everyone else seemed to realize we were a good fit before the two of us did.
“We got engaged in 1996 and married that fall. We were a short engagement and a quick wedding. We were actually married in both our religions. We were married twice in the state of New York. We have two marriage certificates — Islamic and Catholic. I tell people we are as married as married can be. We had four wedding ceremonies. We did the Islamic one and then we did the Catholic one and we had one in Pakistan with my grandparents and then we had another one with family and friends locally. So yeah, we are pretty married!”
They have four children that are “all doing very well.”
“Our oldest son is a marine captain. He is driving a boat on the Erie Canal. He is doing very well with that. My other son is going to medical school. He will be a veterinarian, hopefully coming back to Upstate New York,” he said. “My oldest daughter is getting her master’s degree in speech pathology. I think she will stay in the Rochester area and practice there. My youngest is graduating from Niagara in May. She wants to be a therapist because she had friends who experienced challenges during the COVID time — suicides and other things — at that time I was still a practicing paramedic, so I was out in the field every day with COVID and experiencing these challenges. I think my youngest daughter wants to help people who might be struggling with that for a generation.”
Family values
“It’s the way I was raised. My parents were both first — generation immigrants, they came from Pakistan in the 1960s. My mom taught English, teaching Americans. We always thought that was funny, a foreigner teaching Americans how to speak their own language. She also taught prisoners in Elmira correctional facility — a maximum prison — teaching people in jail for life for rape and murder and a whole host of other things; teaching them to read and write, because she realized that education is your path to freedom,” he said. “My dad spent his whole life at Corning. Had a master’s in chemical and electrical engineering.
“For me what I learned from my parents and my community of Corning is you give what you get. When the flood came to Corning, I was very young, but I heard people left their homes to get the company up and running and the company took care of the people. I have always had a desire to make sure that I could be a resource for those around me. It’s been very fulfilling.”
Some bad things have happened.
“There are things in my head that I prefer to never think about again — some horrific things,” he said. “But I’ve put 56 babies on the earth and there are more than 150 people walking around today because I was there to make a difference and that feels good. In the end it is very simple. I want to make the world a better place when I leave it.”
Dogs … lifesavers
“When we were doing the ambulance service, I could go to sleep at night knowing I made the world a better place and that is what drives me. Saying the word is easy — doing it is what makes the difference,” he said.
He’s had dogs, Labrador retrievers, for many years.
“My dogs saved my life,” he said. “When you doing EMS, you don’t want to think about some of what you’ve experience. So I’d go for a walk with my dogs and you cry with them down the road and get it out of your system.
“When you are an EMT, you have a bad call and guess what? You go and take the next one. I had one day in Webster I had three suicides there is no one else to take the calls for you, you gotta go. One of the big companies in Rochester was laying off people. In the morning one guy killed himself in the kitchen of the house his wife was selling. In the afternoon a guy hung himself because he had been let go and in the evening a guy that had been let go went to his wife’s family’s house and shot himself in the upstairs bedroom. That was our day! One day! Had it not been for my dogs, I think I might have had some serious problems. They are part of my coping mechanism.”
It’s not just what you can do today, but also preparing the next generation to be equally successful, if not more, he said.
“It’s about making sure the next generation is trained to contribute to the world.”
Lifelines
Name: Syed Ahmed Mustafa
Position: CEO, BioSpherix
Age: 56
Birthplace: Corning
Residence: Penfield
Education: Bachelor’s degree in political science – history with certificates in accounting, finance and international business from the University of Rochester, 1990; Master of Business Administration from Simon School of Business, University of Rochester, 1999
Affiliations: Member of Manufacturers Association of NYS (MACNY); CenterState CEO; Alliance for Regenerative Medicine; Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM)/BioSpherix affiliation; NSF Piedmont Triad Regenerative Medicine Engine
Personal: Wife Karen; sons Gabriel and Zachariah; daughters Rhana and Sabriya
Hobbies: “I’m a licensed private pilot and recently obtained my US Coast Guard master’s license.”
