OPTICAL COHERENCE TOMOGRAPHY/SURFACE PLASMON RESONANCE: CBORT, BiOptix each attract $1.4M

Two entities working on photonics-based biomedicine have recently attracted funding in the same amount: $1.4 million.

Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston, MA) has received a National Institutes of Health grant totaling $1,449,151 for its Center for Biomedical OCT Research and Translation (CBORT). With CBORT, principal investigator Brett Bouma (a Strategies in Biophotonics advisory board member) aims to bring groundbreaking advances in optical coherence tomography (OCT) to biomedicine. The center seeks to address the deficient accessibility of cutting-edge OCT instrumentation and technology through innovation of new technical capabilities that are motivated by significant biological and clinical challenges, and through translation, facilitated by direct collaboration. Since CBORT's 2011 launch, its members have initiated six driving biomedical projects and have identified technical projects that will have significant biological and clinical impact. The projects fall into three core thematic areas: advanced structural imaging, functional and compositional contrast, and hybrid imaging modalities.

Colorado-based optical biodetection company BiOptix (Boulder) reports that it has received an additional $1.4 million from investors, which they will use to expand sales and marketing and ramp up manufacturing to meet growing customer demand. The company sees opportunity in the label-free marketplace, which CEO Rick Whitcomb says is looking for a reasonably priced high-performance surface plasmon resonance (SPR) instrument. They have developed and patented an ultra-sensitive detection platform known as Enhanced Surface Plasmon Resonance (ESPR), which pairs the high sensitivity of SPR with the high stability and lower noise of common-path interferometry.