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.
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.
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.