Biotech startup Phitonex closes $2M seed funding to develop the next generation of fluorescent labels and instrumentation to advance the fight against diseases

In life science research and diagnostics, the number of questions per individual cell is the key determining factor whether you can determine clinical efficacy of a life-saving treatment, the potential for a new cure, or the diagnostic ability of a new test. Enter Phitonex, a Durham, North Carolina-based biotech startup developing a platform that allows for the precise engineering of optical properties to provide high resolution analysis of single cells by high throughput flow cytometry. Their NovaFluor labels immediately unlock a higher number of parameters on current instrumentation and provide unmatched cell population resolution to drive enhanced biological insight.

Today, Phitonex announced it has raised $2M seed round led by private investors to develop the next generation fluorescent labels for biomarker detection on single cells. Phitonex reagents provide a cost-effective, non-destructive method to obtain more information about critical molecular biomarkers, simplifying experimental design and accelerating the discovery process.

Founded in 2017 as a Duke University spin-out, the company’s co-founders have over 15 years of collaborative experience engineering labels at the molecular level to tailor their fluorescence properties. “This commitment not only enables us to scale and take our labels to market but also gives us the chance to expand and accelerate our development of precision molecular-scale optics for various applications in need of high resolution biology,” Chris Dwyer, Ph.D. Co-Founder and CSO said.

“Advances in hardware and software have outpaced current dye technology and created a critical need for a rapid increase in high performance fluorescent labels to enable more questions per individual cell. Our Phiton platform and labels meet this opportunity with the right technology, at the right time, and bring new capabilities to extant hardware while lowering the barrier to entry to single cell analysis,” said Alvin Lebeck, Ph.D, Chairman and co-founder of Phitonex.

Phitonex will be releasing its NovaFluor test kits for multicolor staining this fall, and plans to release more labels for high resolution biology soon.