This is a summary of a story by Ken Kingery on Pratt School of Engineering .
Stringing ethernet cables between houses. Committing to a pod together during COVID. Working with family members and close friends. For the team at the startup Ramona , close collaboration is nothing new - bringing together brothers, neighbors, and spouses for the common goal of improving how scientists see their experiments.
Co-founded by Roarke Horstmeyer , associate professor of biomedical engineering at the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering , Ramona is developing new approaches to microscopy by combining images captured by multiple smaller cameras. In general, researchers can run hundreds of experiments simultaneously, testing potential medicines or tracking how organisms respond to chemicals. But recording all those experiments in detail remains a challenge
Ramona's platform, however, is capable of doing so autonomously and in exquisite detail across every well in an entire plate at once, allowing researchers to scale the same process across many plates much more quickly.
Ramona now has more than 70 systems deployed in laboratories across the world, from east Asia to Europe to Australia. Their small core team of four has grown to nearly 30, including sales, marketing and field application scientists traveling the world to demonstrate and install their microscope platforms.
These new additions are found family, joining a tight-knit group where spouses and siblings work together.
National Institutes of Health grants, including Small Business Innovation Research funding, supported the technology's development. All of the company's work recently culminated in a Series A funding round securing another $25 million in investments.
"We're very happy to have this opportunity to continue to improve our technology to help the biomedical community uncover new findings, especially as labs transition to collecting more and more data for AI software-assisted discovery," Horstenmeyer said. "It's an exciting time to be making microscopes!"
Read the full story on Pratt School of Engineering .
