NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Life sciences tools startup Ultivue announced today that it has closed a $5.2 million Series A financing round that included Arch Venture Partners, Hansjoerg Wyss, and several private investors.
The company was founded to commercialize two fluorescence microscopy technologies, called DNA-PAINT and DNA-Exchange, developed at Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
DNA-PAINT involves tagging small pieces of DNA with a fluorescent dye, which transiently bind to matching DNA strands attached to a target molecule, according to the Wyss Institute. This binding makes the target appear to blink under standard fluorescent microscopy, which can be used to overcome the diffraction limit and obtain sharper images of the target than is typically possible. The DNA-Exchange technology is geared for multiplexing and can visualize multiple different molecular species simultaneously.
"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," Ultivue Co-founder David Walt, who also co-founded Illumina and Quanterix, said in a statement.
"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," Keith Crandell, managing director of Arch Venture, added.
Ultivue holds an exclusive license to the DNA-PAINT and DNA-Exchange technologies from Harvard, as well as key enabling technologies from the California Institute of Technology.