Advanced Liquid Logic Gets To Square 1 in Funding

 

Photo courtesy of Advanced Liquid Logic

Advanced Liquid Logic (ALL), one of NCBiotech’s many bioscience success stories, has added another chapter to its head-turning saga.

Durham’s Square 1 Bank has announced that it’s providing ALL a term loan and revolving credit line to help drive the company’s growth.

It started as a business story when Duke University scientist Richard Fair, Ph.D., received a $50,000 Collaborative Funding Grant from NCBiotech in 2003. He used the money to hire Vamsee Pamula, Ph.D., as a postdoc  to work on commercializing his tiny lab-on-a-chip, or microfluidics, devices.

The following year, Pamula and his Duke research colleague, Michael Pollack, Ph.D., formed a company,  Advanced Liquid Logic (ALL),  to advance the groundbreaking platform technology for analyzing genetic data. 

Pamula says the early NCBiotech grant not only kept the research program alive, but it also led to millions of dollars in subsequent grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Richard West joined the company in 2005 as CEO, and helped arrange for more than $468,000 in various Biotech Center loans during the next four years that helped propel ALL toward global attention. ALL now holds hundreds of patents, and has launched its first gene-testing products into the research marketplace.  It has also raised millions of dollars in federal and private funding.

Industrial Fellow Peter Ross, Ph.D.

ALL now employs 80 North Carolinians, including Peter Ross, Ph.D., who started a two-year stint as part of the Biotech Center’s Industrial Fellowship Program.

This program provides industry-oriented research experience to postdoctoral scientists interested in improving their competitiveness for high-level industry positions. NCBiotech funds the majority of the cost of salary and benefits for the trainees, while participating companies share some of the costs.

The company has also signed collaborative product development and commercialization agreements with four commercial partners, including NuGEN Technologies, in genomics sample preparation.

ALL has been recognized by Frost and Sullivan as the “Lab-on-a-Chip Company of the Year.” The Wall Street Journal also gave the company its Technology Innovation Award for its groundbreaking, disruptive technology and its progress in demonstrating its utility.

During the past year, West has also participated in venture capital expeditions organized by the Biotech Center to connect investment-ready North Carolina life-science companies with key fund managers in Palo Alto, New York and Boston.

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