deals, biomedical, startups

Allied Minds Finances Harvard-Northeastern Startup

Erik Mellgren 7/2/08

In March, we wrote about local investment firm Allied Minds, which has a strategy of investing very early in technology developed in university research labs. Today, Allied Minds announced that it has invested in CryoXtract, a startup launched by researchers from Harvard University and Northeastern University.

The inventors of the technology around which CryoXtract was formed, Dale Larson and Jeffrey Ruberti, have developed a new way to take out small portions of frozen liquid biological samples like whole blood or sperm. Instead of first thawing the liquid, withdrawing a part of it, and the refreezing it, Cryoxtract uses a very small, hollow drill to extract a frozen core. This avoids the risk of degrading the samples by repeated thawing and refreezing and takes less time to carry out.

“We are looking for cutting-edge technologies, and this one is quite enabling, there’s nothing remotely similar in the market,” Allied Minds director Vincent Chung told Xconomy. “The market opportunity includes any organization that has a need to take aliquotes [small portions] from frozen samples.”

According to CryoXtract’s webpage, there are more than 500 million stored frozen biological samples in the U.S.. So while the samples are small, the market seems big.