Lead investors in Adarza’s series D venture capital round are 3×5 Partners, based in Portland, Oregon, and Lightchain Capital, the family office of Scottrade founder Rodger Riney.
July 23, 2020
You might be staring at one all day: a dirty computer screen, with its fine layer of dust and smudges, could be more than an eyesore or a reminder of how long you’ve been working—it can actually illustrate the science at play behind a test for examining the body’s wider immune response to the novel coronavirus.
“I’m incredibly obsessive about keeping my computer screen clean,” said Ben Miller, a biomedical engineering professor at the University of Rochester. “And inevitably, someone will immediately come into my office and point something out on the screen and touch it.”
That irksome fingerprint is, essentially, a biological detection experiment, Miller said in an interview with FierceMedTech. “You’re seeing some material left behind on a reflective surface that you can detect by a change in reflectivity.”
That forms the basis for arrayed imaging reflectometry, or the AIR technology being commercialized for biomedical research work by Adarza Biosystems.
It starts with a strong anti-reflective coating, spread across the surface of an otherwise standard-shaped well plate, that works to capture and deflect as much light as possible. Then, capture probes are arrayed on top, designed to bind with a range of different target molecules.
After adding a sample, a laser is used to scan each well. As more target molecules bind to the surface, more light is reflected and captured by the system, delivering a clear signal of whatever is present in one step—such as antibodies for the novel coronavirus or other diseases, or the cytokine regulators of the body’s immune system.
Adarza had been developing the technology for research use in immuno-oncology or cell therapy applications—though it has also been used to study influenza—with plans to begin a commercial rollout this year, according to President and CEO Bryan Witherbee.
However, with the spread of COVID-19 this year, the company pivoted further into respiratory diseases and vaccine development, and aims to provide a more detailed view than other antibody tests on the market.
“Certainly, early on, it was kind of a Wild West situation where everyone was developing antibody tests,” said Miller. “But with very few exceptions, they were all focused on single antigens—so using a single part of a protein from SARS-CoV-2 to detect antibodies. And while that can be pretty useful, it’s limited in terms of what information it gives you.”
“So the advantage that we can bring to the table with our technology was the ability to look at many different antigens at once—so not just one protein from SARS-CoV-2, but lots of them, as well as looking at protein antigens from other upper respiratory infections,” he said.
This could allow researchers to explore whether a person’s pre-existing immunities to other respiratory pathogens can influence their response to COVID-19.
The company is in the midst of beta testing, but plans to release the first acute respiratory panel for its Ziva system this August, Witherbee said. This would include multiple targets for the novel coronavirus, including antigens aimed at its spike protein and variants of its binding domains, as well as the more common human coronaviruses plus respiratory syncytial virus and influenza A and B.
“The path to get to this has been around for over a century,” said Miller. “We use equations for modeling thin films on a chip that have been around for a very long time. The thing is, nobody a century ago thought this would be an actually useful thing to do.”
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June 24, 2020
Biosensing firm Adarza BioSystems is getting ready to launch its Ziva protein detection platform, though a little later than originally expected and including a new application.
In February, the firm raised $25 million in Series D funding and planned a summer release of its platform. But like many other companies, Adarza found itself having to shift its strategy as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic shut down non-essential businesses across the economy. Instead of launching the system with its planned focus on immuno-oncology and neurology, the firm has moved to use its technology for immune profiling research supporting work like SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development.
Adarza didn’t come into the pandemic completely unprepared to shift toward infectious disease work, though, said Benjamin Miller, chair of the company’s scientific advisory board and co-inventor of the arrayed imaging reflectometry technology that underlies the Ziva platform.
Last year, Miller, who is a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Rochester, participated in a study led by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Centers for Excellence in Influenza Research and Surveillance (CEIRS) looking at the potential for canine H3 influenza viruses to infect humans and at the ability of the CEIRS network to produce and share basic research characterizing an emerging influenza virus.
Miller said his lab has been part of the CEIRS network “for a number of years and has published quite a few papers on making antigen arrays for studying human responses to vaccines as well as using them in the context of [infectious disease] surveillance.”
In the case of the canine flu study, which was published in PLOS Pathogens in April, Miller and his colleagues were working on what he said was essentially an exercise in responding to a mock pandemic.
“Basically we were given the task of [studying], ‘if dog flu suddenly became a pandemic, how would you respond’?” he said. “So we, along with many others within the [CEIRS] network, developed technologies and protocols that we could use to respond to a pandemic event. That exercise had just finished and we had just submitted a paper from the entire network describing how we had addressed that mock exercise, when all of a sudden SARS-CoV-2 appeared on the horizon.”
Seeing that, Miller began moving to develop a serology test for SARS-CoV-2, along with a number of other viruses, including influenza, on his lab’s arrayed imaging reflectometry system. He and Adarza then adapted that assay to the commercial Ziva system, with the company now planning to offer it as a research tool.
The assay measures antibodies to a number of SARS-CoV-2 proteins believed to be highly immunogenic, as well as to mutated forms of those proteins and proteins from other coronaviruses, influenza type A, type B, respiratory syncytial virus, and metapneumovirus. In all, the assay multiplexes around 30 viral proteins, said Bryan Witherbee, Adarza’s president and CEO.
“There has been a tremendous amount of work in developing [serology] tests for SARS-CoV-2,” Miller said. “Most of those have relied on a single antigen to detect antibodies, and in the diagnostic world, that has been somewhat of a problem for some assays in terms of having the right specificity and sensitivity.”
“In the research context, which is where we are really focused, it is an even bigger issue, because … you really want to have that broader understanding of a person’s immune system and whether they have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, whether they have antibodies to other upper respiratory viruses, and how all those different antibody profiles interact in the context of a disease state that we want to study or a vaccine that we want to develop,” he added, noting that he believed this made the Ziva’s multiplexing capabilities particularly useful.
“We’re going into vaccine season, and there are several things that are going to happen in terms of clinical trials for some of these vaccines. And being able to understand the [immune] profile of your candidates who are coming in to get the vaccine may be important,” Witherbee said. “We are really targeting this now for research use only, with the idea that in the future, we could go into in vitro diagnostics.”
According to the company, the platform is capable of measuring several hundred analytes simultaneously. The arrayed imaging reflectometry approach underlying the platform uses silicon chips coated in an antireflective film. When the surface is illuminated with a laser, target analytes bound to probes interrupt this antireflective surface, producing reflected light that can be detected by a camera and used to quantify the amount of target present.
Adarza has been planning to launch the Ziva platform for some time. The company initially aimed for a release in 2012 and later announced that it hoped to launch the system in 2015.
Adarza has now pushed its planned summer launch of the system to September due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. At the same time, it has begun placing instruments with early-access users interested in using the platform for research into the virus.
In addition to a formal launch of the instrument, Adarza is also planning in coming months to launch the multi-virus serology test that Miller and his lab developed.
The company “was gearing up for the full launch of Ziva as a biomarker discovery system, and then along came the pandemic, which put the kibosh on just about everything everyone was doing,” Witherbee said. “But because of the work [Miller’s lab] had done on this pandemic exercise last year … we were able to shift the focus to find a way to provide immediate help to researchers now.”
“It’s an early adopter program in that labs have come forth and asked for the device,” he said. “But this is ahead of the full commercial launch.”
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Ziva uses arrayed imaging reflectometry (AIR), a technology co-developed by Ben Miller, a founder of St. Louis-based Adaraza and professor of dermatology, biochemistry and biophysics as well as biomedical engineering at the University of Rochester in New York.
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The Series D funding round was co-led by Portland-based 3×5 Partners and Lightchain Capital, the family office of Scottrade founder Rodger Riney. The round also includes follow-on investments from Serra Ventures, Holton Capital Group and BioGenerator. The fresh financing follows Adarza’s $17 million Series C round in 2016 and brings the startup’s total capital raised to $54 million.
Ardarza CEO Bryan Witherbee said his company will use the new funds to prepare for and undertake full commercialization of its ZIVA platform, a biological testing device designed to assist researchers with disease profiling and drug development.
]]>Biotech company Adarza Biosystems has raised $25 million to support commercialization of its research technology.
Adarza, based in Maryland Heights, makes diagnostic systems for researchers and drug companies. It plans to launch its testing platform commercially in June.
Adarza plans to use the funds to support full commercialization of ZIVA, its automated biological testing platform for academic and clinical research. Scheduled for commercial launch in June, the ZIVA platform will allow researchers to quickly identify inflammation, cardiovascular, and oncology protein biomarkers for disease profiling and drug development.
“Other testing platforms fall short,” said 3×5 Partners Managing Director Joe Biller. “Because of its speed, automation, and simplicity, we see immense opportunity with Adarza’s technology, particularly when it comes to drug development and personalized medicine.”
Adarza’s technology includes a bench-top instrument and a portfolio of multiplexed assays that can assess hundreds of protein biomarkers simultaneously from a single biological sample, like tissue or blood, according to Bryan Witherbee, Adarza’s president and CEO. Using proprietary methods to create arrays of biologically active molecules on silicon chips, an endless number of targets can be detected in a single test, including antibodies, nucleic acids, peptides, and whole viruses/bacteria.
St. Louis-based biotech company Wugen is already using the ZIVA platform as it develops gene-editing technologies to develop cell therapies for cancer treatment.
“Adarza’s ZIVA immunoassays are enabling us to follow more biomarkers, helping us speed up our ability to develop allogeneic CAR-T therapies,” said John McKearn, Ph.D., CEO of Wugen.
With today’s Series D funding, Adarza has raised a total of $54 million.
Earlier round investors in Adarza include BioGenerator, RiverVest Venture Partners, Cultivation Capital, and Lewis & Clark Ventures.
With the Series D close, Adarza is adding two new board members: Drew Dennison, managing director for St. Louis-based Lightchain, and Joe Biller, 3×5 Partners managing director.
Adarza is also in the process of expanding its team to support commercialization efforts in 2020.
About Adarza BioSystems, Inc.
Adarza is a leading developer and manufacturer of label-free biosensor assays and instruments servicing life science research, drug development and, in-vitro diagnostics customers. Adarza’s platform is capable of rapidly identifying and quantifying a series of biological target analyte species in a fluid sample, without chemical labels or complex processing. Adarza’s technology offers key performance benefits in speed, ease of use, large screening arrays, and custom assays as well as industry-standard expectations for sensitivity, sample size, and dynamic range. Adarza products address broad quantitative analyte detection applications, including cancer biomarkers, drug and vaccine development, allergy, immunology, and infectious diseases research. For more information, visit www.adarza.wpengine.com or @AdarzaBio.
About 3×5 Partners
3×5 Partners is a growth-oriented venture capital firm. 3×5 “invests in what the world needs.” We partner with, and invest in, passionate entrepreneurs pioneering innovative and impactful solutions in the life science and natural resource sectors. Founded in 2011 in Portland, Oregon, the 3×5 team has a track record of delivering proven returns for its investors and a reputation of being a patient and trusted partner to its portfolio companies. To learn more, please visit www.3x5Partners.com.
About Lightchain Capital
Lightchain Capital, the family office for Scottrade Founder and former Chief Executive Officer Rodger Riney, makes strategic venture capital investments in the life science and technology sectors.
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]]>a fully automated protein multiplex detection system
ST. LOUIS (May 2, 2019) — Biotech startup Adarza Biosystems, Inc. announced today that it will reveal its new protein multiplex instrument ZIVA at Immunology 2019, the annual meeting of the American Association of Immunologists (AAI) from May 9 – 13. Using a simple, time-saving workflow, the new automated system can simultaneously measure, analyze and report on up to 200 biomarkers.
Designed to be user-friendly for clinical researchers, academic medical centers, pharmaceutical companies, government scientists, and clinical labs, Adarza’s multiplexing ZIVA platform relies on its proprietary AIR
technology to create and analyze arrays of biologically active molecules on miniature biosensors.
Unlike other technologies on the market, Adarza allows for
- capability to measure from 1 to as many as 200 biomarkers from a single sample with results in less than 25 minutes for a complete 96-well plate
- testing a variety of biological targets including proteins, autoantibodies, DNA/RNA, viruses and bacteria
- greater flexibility with label-free assays which simplifies workflow and reduces reagent amount and costs
- customization to quickly and effectively create new biosensors or add new content to existing biosensors
According to Adarza CEO Bryan Witherbee: “Adarza and its new ZIVA platform will make life easier for labs looking to reduce complexity while providing reliability and flexibility, whether they’re studying disease biomarkers or developing new drugs.”
In addition to offering a menu of cytokines and inflammation biomarkers at full commercial launch in 2020, ZIVA assay offerings will expand to include oncology, metabolic, cardiovascular, and other relevant clinical protein targets. Because of the flexibility of Adarza’s AIR technology, future offerings will enable researchers to detect biomarkers for autoimmune disease and allergy testing and help with development of personalized medicine.
Adarza will demonstrate ZIVA’s capabilities at Booth #730 at Immunology 2019, from May 9 – 13 at the San Diego Convention Center.
About Adarza
At Adarza Biosystems, our mission is to provide labs with the easiest, fastest and most cost- effective solutions that provide reliable analysis and nearly instantaneous reporting on biological samples. Adarza’s new multiplex biosensor platform called ZIVA will initially be used for pharmaceutical drug discovery and biomedical research. It is currently being tested by leading biopharmaceutical companies. Visit us at or on Twitter @AdarzaBio.
]]>St. Louis, MO June 11, 2018 –Adarza BioSystems recently moved to a new facility in the Pageview Business Center within the St. Louis West County suburb of Maryland Heights. The new headquarters, located off Welsch Industrial Court near Page and Schuetz Road, is approximately 10,000 square feet, including 4,500 square feet of manufacturing space, large research and development area, and a unique open-office design with many conference rooms and meeting booths. The open concept work area gives employees the freedom to move around and collaborate effortlessly. With ample space, Adarza now has the room to support development and manufacturing of its novel instrument and biosensor assays targeted for launch in 2019.
Adarza would like to thank all the companies that made our new office possible: DCMgroup & PageView Partners for the beautiful location, Arcturis & POE for designing and furnishing, G.S. & S. General Contractors, along with Birkel Electric, Innovation Mechanical & E&M Plumbing for all their hard work in making the design reality. We couldn’t be more thrilled to call this space our new home.
For further information on Adarza Biosystems please contact:
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Once Adarza’s products launch in the second quarter of 2019, it will be one of a handful of local life sciences startups to have done so.
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Completes Leadership Team, Rebranding and Relocation
St. LOUIS, MO (May 23, 2018) – Adarza BioSystems, Inc., a biotechnology company developing a novel protein and biomolecule detection platform, announced today that it has put in place the leadership, new manufacturing center and branding to begin selling its technology to researchers in the second quarter of 2019.
Adarza’s imaging technology can identify hundreds of targets within a single test, from small amounts of tissue, blood or other biological samples. Using proprietary methods to create arrays of biologically active molecules on silicon chips, an endless number of targets can be detected including antibodies, nucleic acids, peptides and whole viruses/bacteria.
The first products to launch will be a series of multiplexed assays for profiling inflammation, cardiovascular and oncology protein biomarkers. The products will initially be offered to university laboratories and commercial enterprises involved in life science and clinical research primarily focused on drug development.
In the 14 months since it raised $17 million in its Series C financing, led by RiverVest Venture Partners, Adarza has benefitted from St. Louis’ strong life science ecosystem to build a team of leaders who are taking its technology to commercialization. Adarza’s leadership team includes St. Louis researchers, engineers and executives who were previously with some of the region’s leading pharmaceutical, diagnostic, medical, semiconductor and agtech companies.
Joining Adarza President Bryan Witherbee and co-founder and V.P., Technology, Christopher Striemer, Ph.D., Adarza’s new leadership team includes:
- Chief Commercial Officer Linda Meeh, Ph.D., formerly with Merck Millipore;
- V.P., Manufacturing Bob Crepin, formerly with SunEdison Semiconductor;
- V.P., Research and Development Jon Schmuke, formerly with Pfizer and Monsanto;
- Director of Engineering Jason Mitchell, previously with Monsanto;
- Director of Quality Control and Assurance Nannette Langevin, previously with Monsanto;
- Director of Software Engineering Randy Motluck, formerly with bioMérieux.
In preparation for the commercial launch, Adarza is developing the second generation instrument that will be a fully automated, bench-top system enabling minimal hands-on time and simple workflow, according to Witherbee. The newly designed instrument will provide all the industry-standard features in a detection system but with affordability, flexibility and the capability to assess hundreds of protein biomarkers simultaneously from a single sample, Witherbee said.
The Adarza technology will be marketed across multiple industry segments including drug discovery and clinical research (from cancer to inflammation to metabolic diseases and more), vaccine and allergy testing, and agriculture sciences.
To ensure Adarza has enough space for full-scale manufacturing, the technology company moved its product-development functions and headquarters to St. Louis’ Westport/Maryland Heights area where it now has 10,000 square feet including 4,500 square feet of manufacturing space. St. Louis-based Arcturis designed the new office space which is furnished by POE-Professional Office Environments.
Founded in West Henrietta, N.Y., Adarza moved its production facilities to St. Louis in 2013 in large part due to the strong financial support provided by St. Louis-based investors. Adarza has raised a total of $31 million, with $20 million of it from St. Louis investors including RiverVest Venture Partners, Lewis & Clark Ventures, Cultivation Capital, BioGenerator, the St. Louis Arch Angels, Arch Grants, the Helix Fund, Missouri Technology Corp. and Dave Smoller, a former Sigma-Aldrich executive.
About Adarza BioSystems, Inc.
St. Louis, Mo.-based Adarza is a leading developer and manufacturer of label-free biosensor assays and instruments servicing life science research, drug development and in vitro diagnostics customers. Adarza’s platform is capable of rapidly identifying and quantifying a series of biological target analyte species in a fluid sample, without chemical labels or complex processing. Adarza’s technology offers key performance benefits in speed, ease of use, large screening arrays and custom assay as well as industry-standard expectations for sensitivity, sample size, and dynamic range. Adarza products address broad quantitative analyte detection applications, including cancer biomarkers, drug and vaccine development, allergy, immunology and infectious diseases research. For more information, visit www.adarza.wpengine.com or @AdarzaBio.
Media Contact:
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