The Boston-based startup, CytoTronics raises $9.25 million in the initial seed funding led by Anzu Partners. The other investors who participated in the funding round are Milad Mlucozai (BoxOne Ventures) and other institutional investors. 2020-founded CytoTronics, a biotechnology company building a next-gen complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-powered drug discovery platform, will use the fund raised to advance its breakthrough platform that utilizes computer chip technology to conduct a suite of electrical and electrochemical cell-based assays.
Built upon a decade of research and proofs-of-concept, the CytoTronics platform is developed at Harvard University. The startup’s team aims to re-engineer life science data acquisition. The product is developed by a team of electrical engineers, chemical biologists and biomedical researchers at Harvard, where the CytoTronics founding team recognized the potential to revolutionize drug discovery across various therapeutic areas. The suite of patented technologies has been licensed exclusively to CytoTronics under an agreement coordinated by the Harvard Office of Technology Development to enable its commercial development.
CytoTronics leverages CMOS technology to measure and manipulate live cells. CytoTronics advanced CMOS electronics achieves single-cell spatial resolution that greatly enhances the accuracy of the measured cell-biology information and enables optics-free images of growing cells. Additionally, the circuit integration facilitates the packaging of these techniques into small, plug-and-play devices for affordable and at-scale research for drug discovery applications.
“We are targeting the roughly $20 billion low-throughput cell-based assay market with the CytoTronics platform and plan to quickly progress to higher-throughputs – in short, making drug discovery research more precise, automatic, repeatable, and scalable,” said Jeffrey Abbott, Ph.D., co-founder & CEO at CytoTronics. “This seed funding allows us to commercialize our research-demonstrated devices and move towards becoming a unique electronics player in the now optics-dominated, cell-based drug screening global market.”
CytoTronic’s’technology was developed in the labs of co-founders Donhee Ham, Ph.D., the Gordon McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Hongkun Park, Ph.D., the Mark Hyman Jr. Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. CEO Abbott and Chief Technology Officer Vince Wu, Ph.D., were advised by Park and Ham as researchers at Harvard, where they contributed to the inventions over the course of several years. Abbott and Wu have also joined CytoTronics Board of Directors along with Co-founder and Chief Business Officer Duane Sword, Executive Chairman Douglas Kahn, and Anzu Partners Principal Jenna Abelli.
“Thanks to the support from our investors, we have the opportunity to further develop the CytoTronics platform to offer unique information and statistics from cells in real-time at a much higher resolution than previously possible,” said Wu. “Our technology will enable scientists and researchers to capture highly valuable image-based information from cells in real-time and in high-throughput, which will potentially revolutionize early-stage drug-discovery process in multiple areas such as oncology, gastroenterology, cardiology, and neurology.”
“We are proud to lead CytoTronics’s seed round and look forward to supporting the team as they move into the next phase in developing this unique CMOS-powered biotechnology platform,” said Jenna Abelli, principal at Anzu Partners. “We believe the high-resolution images and data readouts from the CytoTronics platform have the potential to unlock new avenues in bioinformatics where novel insights are easily gleaned from mining the rich multi-parametric data and applying it to therapeutic research and phenotypic screenings.”
“The technology from the Ham and Park labs enables, truly, a leap ahead in electrochemical measurement of cultured cells, at the subcellular and intracellular levels. They’re packing electrodes into the chip, collecting millions of measurements, and giving it an accessible visual readout, all in one device,” said Chris Petty, Director of Business Development in Harvard Office of Technology Development. “It’s been exciting for us in OTD to work with Jeffrey, Vince, and Duane to validate the market opportunity through extensive customer discovery, and we’re delighted to see CytoTronics launch with robust seed funding and a strong founding team to take the technology forward.”
CytoTronics’ newly opened office in Agility Labs life sciences facility in Boston is equipped with private dedicated biosafety level 2 wet biology labs and dry electronics labs to enable it continue further development of its platform.
