LA JOLLA, Calif., Feb. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Vala Sciences announced today its establishment as a provider of cell image-based reagents and analysis software tools to academic, pharmaceutical and biotechnology scientists. The company’s core scientific and engineering team hails from Q3DM, a developer of high throughput image analysis instrumentation and software that was acquired by Beckman Coulter in December 2003. Since March 2004, Vala Sciences has been developing cell image-based reagent systems and software programs that allow the high throughput, quantitative analysis of images generated on any fluorescence microscope or high throughput cellular imaging system.
“Researchers invest a great deal of time and effort analyzing images obtained from fluorescence-based microscopy,” said Jeffrey Price, Ph.D., founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Vala Sciences. “We founded Vala Sciences to automate what now takes researchers weeks of time to accomplish. We took our experience developing the Q3DM microscopy system and software and are now applying that knowledge to create a platform-independent software suite that can quickly and quantitatively analyze one or thousands of microscopy images per experiment.”
“Vala Sciences’ technology allowed us to generate data that we had not been able to obtain before,” said David Zacharias, professor at University of Florida. “The company’s software can rapidly and quantitatively analyze cell images, whereas without the software, we had to rely on qualitative observations which were labor intensive and could take any where from days to weeks to obtain.”
Vala Sciences has obtained $3.5 million in grants and angel investments, including two National Institutes of Health (NIH) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants, one for assay development and the other for cell image-based software analysis development. The company has also obtained funding from the California Technology Investment Partnership Program (CALTIP) and private individual investors.
Vala Sciences has collaborations with the Chemical Genomics Research Consortium of the Gulf Coast Consortia and with The Burnham Institute to develop a variety of assays in several areas of research. The company also collaborates with Regenemed Inc. to develop assays for drug toxicity in 3D imaging assays of engineered liver tissue. They also have a collaboration with the University of Florida to develop high throughput genomics assays.
The company was founded by Jeffrey Price, M.D., Ph.D. and Edward Hunter, Ph.D., who were also the co-founders of Q3DM. Dr. Price, chairman and chief executive officer, is also an associate professor at The Burnham Institute and holds a research scientist appointment in Bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Hunter, director and chief technology officer, was the main architect of the CytoShop(TM) software developed at Q3DM.
About Vala Sciences
Vala Sciences was founded in 2004 to develop cell imaging analysis tools and assays, which enable information-rich high throughput measurements for obtaining new fundamental insights into cell function and screening for new pharmaceutical agents. The company has academic and industrial collaborations in place to develop assays for a variety of cell image-based assays. The company’s technology converts labor-intensive qualitative observations of cell images into accurate measurements delivered automatically in minutes. The management team of Vala Sciences has a proven track record of developing commercially viable software tools for image-based analysis.
Vala Sciences
CONTACT: Carolyn Hawley of Atkins + Associates, +1-858-527-3484,chawley@irpr.com, for Vala Sciences