Ultivue Announces $5.15 Million Series A Financing

New company will provide inexpensive access to super-resolution microscopy

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Oct 13, 2015, 09:03 ET

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 13, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Ultivue, an early stage life sciences tools company, today announced the completion of $5.15 million in Series A financing from a group of investors including ARCH Venture Partners, Hansjoerg Wyss, and several private investors.

Ultivue is based on DNA-PAINT and DNA-Exchange technologies developed at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University by Peng Yin, Ph.D., Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute and Associate Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Ralf Jungmann, a former Postdoctoral Fellow in Yin's Wyss Institute lab, now Group Leader at Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany.

Drs. Yin and Jungmann co-founded the company with David R. Walt, Ph.D., co-founder of Illumina and Quanterix, University Professor at Tufts University, Founding Director of Tufts Institute for Innovation, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor.

"Ultivue's vision is to provide the ultimate view into biology," said Yin. "Dr. Walt is an amazing academic entrepreneur. I am thrilled to co-found Ultivue with him and to work with its world class team to provide enabling tools that will transform scientific discovery and clinical practice."

Ultivue's DNA-PAINT and DNA-Exchange technologies enable more informative and detailed image collection for life sciences research and medical diagnostics. Ultivue's reagent kits take advantage of the dynamic and tunable properties of interacting short DNA strands. DNA strands are used to guide and transiently label target biomolecules to reveal exquisite spatial resolution and quantitative information that can provide a more accurate picture of cellular behavior and disease progression. DNA-PAINT and DNA-Exchange can be applied to study a wide range of sample types including tissue samples, cultured cells, and blood smears.

"Ultivue's technology is revolutionary because it makes very high resolution microscopy experiments possible and enables researchers to look at numerous biomolecules simultaneously in a single sample," said Walt. "Dr. Yin is a fantastic innovator, and it's exciting to be involved in making the technology commercially available, allowing more researchers access to this inexpensive microscopic imaging technique."

Added Keith Crandell, co-founder and Managing Director, ARCH Venture Partners: "The novelty and simplicity of Ultivue's technology and its compatibility with a huge installed base of existing microscopes will bring enormous value to the life sciences. We are thrilled to support the company as it transforms super resolution microscopy and enables new avenues of biomedical discovery and digital pathology."

In addition to the Series A funding, Ultivue has received an exclusive license from Harvard University for the Wyss Institute's DNA-PAINT and DNA-Exchange technologies and acquired the rights to other key enabling technology from California Institute of Technology.

About Ultivue

Ultivue is an early stage life sciences tools company that seeks to provide the ultimate view into biology. Ultivue produces reagents that enable researchers to obtain microscopic images at an unprecedented resolution that vastly improve our understanding of biology and medicine. Ultivue's products are designed for fluorescent microscopy-based research and will eventually be valuable for clinical diagnostic use. The company's patented technologies enable single molecule detection and visualization of a multitude of biomolecules, including proteins and nucleic acids, the key drivers of cellular functions and indicators of disease states. Ultivue is based in Cambridge, MA. For more information, visit www.Ultivue.com.

SOURCE Ultivue