Seattle-based Alpenglow Biosciences today announced a partnership with PathNet, a leading U.S. pathology laboratory, to help commercialize use of the startup’s 3D microscope technology in clinical settings. The effort aims to modernize critical diagnostic tests for prostate and bladder cancers.
The company also confirmed $250,000 in new funding from Mike Rice, former CEO of BioLife Solutions and an Alpenglow advisory board member.
Alpenglow, which spun out of the University of Washington in 2018, has developed tools for quickly creating multi-dimensional images from biological tissue samples and accurately analyzing the results.
The technology is already in use in academic research labs and pharmaceutical companies. The move into clinical applications serving patients requires additional rigor.
“People’s lives are depending on it,” CEO and co-founder Dr. Nick Reder said in an interview. “So there’s a lot more regulatory compliance and validation that needs to be done.”
Alpenglow has been collaborating with the international optics pioneer Zeiss to engineer the unique microscope hardware and analytics software needed for clinical use. PathNet will take the technology from that partnership and use it at its Little Rock, Ark., lab to develop and validate tools for cancer diagnoses.
Jason Camilletti, CEO of PathNet, praised Alpenglow’s “revolutionary 3D platform.” The new partnership, he added in a statement, can “modernize genitourinary cancer diagnostics for clinicians and patients across the country.”
Reder launched the company to solve problems he experienced as a medical resident in pathology at the University of Washington.
“I wasted hundreds, no thousand of hours of my time, sifting through the images and trying to make sense of them,” Reder said.
Alpenglow’s AI-trained algorithms, he said, can analyze biological samples “and then predict ‘this is your risk for metastasis,’ or ‘this is the likelihood that you’ll respond to a drug.’ And so it really adds a lot of value to the diagnostic workflow.”
The startup has 22 employees and raised approximately $10 million from investors. It has also received roughly $10 million in grant support.
Last year the company was awarded $2 million in federal funding to create a prostate cancer diagnostic tool alongside CorePlus, a pathology software company. Alpenglow is also part of a multi-institution, five-year project worth up to $21 million that launched as part of the Biden administration’s Cancer Moonshot. The effort is developing technology for identifying tumor margins during cancer surgeries.
Alpenglow has customers including GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline), InSight Biopharmaceuticals, dermatology companies and others.
The other co-founders are Jonathan Liu, an affiliate professor in the UW’s Department of Mechanical Engineering; Adam Glaser, now a senior scientist at the Allen Institute; and the UW’s Lawrence True.
Reder is pleased to reach this point of development with the company after so many years of work.
“Actually getting into the clinic this year and then hopefully regulatory approval next year and all these big landmarks, it’s really exciting,” he said. “That was always the goal.”
