The cell you just measured? You can find it again.

Profile · Single-Cell Biology

In a 6,000 square-foot lab off Bear Hill Road in Waltham, a flow cytometer is doing something it was never designed to do: reading the same cells a second time. The sample has been through the machine before. It will go through again. Each cell carries a tiny laser, and that laser remembers its name.

Who They Are Now

LASE Innovation Inc. is a small techbio company with an unfashionably specific obsession: it wants you to be able to follow a single cell. Not a population. Not an average. One cell, tracked across assays and across time. The company sells this as services today and is building it into instruments for tomorrow, all from a BSL-2+ facility stocked with LASE-enabled cytometers, microscopy and cryogenic storage.

The pitch fits on a business card: connect the phenotype, genotype and function of single cells. The technology behind it is harder to summarize, which is rather the point.

"The immune system is a dynamic system. Bringing researchers the ability to measure the dynamic responses of their cells will dramatically advance their understanding of immune function - and lead to better therapies." Dr. Sheldon Kwok, CEO & Co-Founder

The Problem They Saw

Flow cytometry has a memory problem. You stain a cell, shoot it past a laser, record its colors, and then it is gone - mixed back into the tube, indistinguishable from its neighbors. Want to read it again with a different panel? You cannot. Want to know how that exact cell changes after you poke it? Tough.

Researchers have tried to compensate by cramming more colors onto each cell - 20, 30, 40 fluorescent markers at once. It works, in the way that juggling 40 plates works: technically impressive, spectrally crowded, and a nightmare to design. The colors bleed into each other. The panels take months to validate. And you still only get to look once.

Conventional cytometry reads a cell once and lets it go. That is fine, until the question you care about only shows up the second time you look.

The Founders' Bet

The fix came out of a place that usually points lasers at tissue rather than sticking them to it. At the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, in the lab of Prof. Seok-Hyun "Andy" Yun, the team built laser particles: light-emitting specks, nano-to-micron in size, that each emit a single, razor-thin band of color - narrower than 0.2 nanometers, tunable across more than a thousand wavelengths.

Sheldon J. J. Kwok finished his PhD in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics at MIT doing exactly this work, and in 2019 he and Yun spun it out as LASE Innovation. The bet was simple and slightly stubborn: if every cell carries its own narrowband laser, every cell becomes individually addressable. Give it a barcode, and you can read it as many times as you like.

The Product

The platform is called LP™ Optical Cell Barcoding, and it does three things that flow cytometry could not do on its own. Multi-pass Flow™ runs the same sample through the cytometer multiple times, so a punishing 40-color panel can be broken into several small, well-separated ones - easier to design, easier to trust. Time-lapse Flow™ tracks the same individual cells across time points, so you see how one cell's markers change rather than how a crowd shifts on average. And because the barcode is optical and non-destructive, the same cells can be carried over into imaging and sequencing.

Break the impossible panel into easy ones. Read the sample again. Watch the same cell change. The barcode is the trick that makes all three possible.

The work is not a brochure claim. The multi-pass approach was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering in November 2023, and a 2024 paper in Cytometry Part A showed the barcoding surviving the fixation and permeabilization steps that usually wreck delicate assays. For a company this size, the publication record is doing a lot of the talking.

The Proof

Numbers, where they help. The company is tiny - around ten people - and has raised a $5M Series A on top of seed money and competitive grants. That is not a unicorn story, and LASE has not pretended otherwise. The interesting figures are technical, not financial: the count of wavelengths, the width of an emission line, the number of times you can read a sample before the answer changes.

The TITAN assay with Talon Biomarkers is the clearest proof that this leaves the lab bench. It tracks the same T cells before and after activation, showing how each cell's candidate biomarkers shift - the kind of per-cell kinetics that population averages quietly erase. The NCI evidently agreed it was worth backing twice.

The Mission

Strip away the optics and the mission is almost old-fashioned: see more clearly. LASE wants researchers to follow every cell - to connect what a cell looks like, what its genes say, and what it does, all on the same individual cell instead of three different tubes and a hopeful assumption that they match. In immunology, where the action is in how cells change, that is not a luxury. It is the whole question.

"Follow every cell" is a strange thing to put on a wall. It is also, if it works, how you stop guessing about the immune system and start watching it.

Why It Matters Tomorrow

Cell therapies, autoimmune drugs and cancer immunotherapies all live or die on what individual immune cells do over time. The tools that built modern immunology were mostly snapshots. LASE is betting the next decade belongs to the movie - and that the way you film it is by giving every cell a name it can keep across frames.

It is a small company making a precise wager. Maybe the laser particle becomes standard equipment in single-cell labs. Maybe it stays a specialist's tool for the hardest kinetic questions. Either way, the premise is sound: a measurement you can repeat beats a measurement you cannot.

Back in Waltham, the cytometer hums through another pass. The sample is the same one from an hour ago. The cells are where they were, only now they are telling a longer story - because someone decided that reading them once was never going to be enough.