wyss-institute
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Spear Bio
Spear Bio is a Woburn, Massachusetts biotechnology company commercializing SPEAR (Successive Proximity Extension Amplification Reaction), an ultra-sensitive, wash-free immunoassay platform licensed from Harvard's Wyss Institute. SPEAR measures protein biomarkers at attomolar levels from sub-microliter samples using a two-factor authentication mechanism and standard qPCR instruments, delivering more than a 5-log improvement over conventional ELISA. The company sells assay kits - initially for neurodegeneration biomarkers such as pTau217, pTau231, GFAP and neurofilament light - to academic, pharmaceutical and clinical researchers.
Feng Xuan
Feng Xuan is a Boston-based scientist-entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Spear Bio, a biotechnology company building ultra-sensitive immunoassays for protein research and early disease diagnostics. He invented the company's core SPEAR (Successive Proximity Extension Amplification Reaction) technology as a Technology Development Fellow at Harvard's Wyss Institute, translating a decade of research in molecular and immuno-diagnostics into a platform that can measure minute quantities of protein biomarkers from sub-microliter samples. Under his leadership, Spear Bio raised an oversubscribed $45 million Series A in 2024 and earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for a blood-based pTau 217 test aimed at early Alzheimer's disease detection.
Circe
Circe (Circe Bioscience) is a Boston-based climate biotech company that engineers microbes to eat carbon dioxide and build valuable molecules - fats, oils, sugars, plastics and fuels - using only CO2, water and electricity. Spun out of Harvard's Wyss Institute in 2021, its gas-fermentation platform consumes roughly 3 kilograms of CO2 for every kilogram of oil it produces, making the process carbon-negative. The company has made the world's first chocolate using fermentation-derived cocoa butter and, in September 2024, raised a $5M seed round to open a pilot plant in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Unravel Biosciences
Unravel Biosciences is a clinical-stage therapeutics company spun out of Harvard's Wyss Institute that starts with a patient's RNA rather than a drug target. Its BioNAV probabilistic network model of human health screens 40,000-plus compounds in silico - reporting roughly 200x the hit rate of conventional screens - to find existing molecules that can push a disease back toward health. The company validates predictions in engineered whole-organism models (including CRISPR-edited tadpoles) and then in patients, aiming to bring effective, lower-cost therapies to rare and overlooked diseases. Its lead asset, RVL-001 (a proprietary formulation of vorinostat), holds FDA Orphan Drug Designation for Rett syndrome and has entered clinical studies.
Richard Novak
Richard Novak is a bioengineer and entrepreneur who co-founded and leads Unravel Biosciences, a rare disease therapeutics company built on its BioNAV platform that uses RNA network analysis to ask whether a drug will help real patients before working backward to find its target. A former lead engineer at Harvard's Wyss Institute with 15+ years in drug discovery systems, he also founded the swab company Rhinostics during the COVID-19 pandemic and the science-education nonprofit Future Scientist. Novak holds a PhD in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley and a BS in Biology from Emory, and is a 2024 Termeer Fellow.
Shannon Nangle
Shannon Nangle is a microbe-wrangling scientist turned CEO who co-founded Circe Bioscience to make fats, oils, and even chocolate out of thin air. Her company feeds carbon dioxide, water, and electricity to engineered microbes that grow like plants and excrete valuable molecules, producing food and industrial ingredients in a carbon-negative way. Spun out of Harvard's Wyss Institute in 2021, Circe made what it calls the world's first gas-fermentation-derived chocolate and has raised over $17 million to scale a manufacturing process Nangle spent six years building.
3EO Health
3EO Health is a Beverly, Massachusetts molecular diagnostics company that built the first point-of-care molecular test priced under $15. Spun out of Harvard's Wyss Institute, its proprietary 3TR amplification technology delivers PCR-level sensitivity without sample preparation, expensive consumables, or complex lab equipment - putting molecular-grade testing in clinics, workplaces, and homes. The company calls itself a 'Point of Life' diagnostics company on a mission to democratize access to high-quality testing.