NEW YORK – Vizgen, a Harvard University spinout that is commercializing spatial transcriptomics technology, laid off an unknown number of employees earlier this month.
The scale of the layoffs and where the cuts have been made are not yet clear, but several former employees have noted the layoffs in social media posts.
Vizgen acknowledged the cuts in an email, but declined to provide details. "In order to scale and focus our business and ensure long-term sustainability and growth, we have made some changes that have resulted in the departure of some valued employees," a company spokesperson said.
Earlier this week, former Head of Human Resources Geraldine Zang wrote in a LinkedIn post that "regrettably, some incredible talents at Vizgen were laid off in October" as part of an appeal to hiring managers in her network to consider them. Zang noted that she left the company at the end of September "due to an urgent family matter."
Based on social media posts from other former employees, Vizgen laid off people in both R&D and commercial roles. Technical roles cut included a computational biologist, a manufacturing engineer, and a senior scientist.
Vizgen launched in 2019 to commercialize fluorescence in situ hybridization-based spatial transcriptomics technology developed by Xiaowei Zhuang's Harvard lab. The firm announced it had raised $14 million in Series A financing in January 2020 and closed a $37 million Series B financing round in April 2021.
The company spokesperson added that Vizgen has grown the adoption of its Merscope spatial genomics platform year on year and that, at the start of Q4, it will have a team twice the size it did a year prior.