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Science Visionaries Add CEO at Ultivue
[May 02, 2016]

Science Visionaries Add CEO at Ultivue


Ultivue announced today Dr. Michael J. Natan as its new President and Chief Executive Officer. Ultivue is an early-stage life sciences tools company that produces reagents that enable researchers to obtain microscopic images with unprecedented super resolution and levels of multiplexing, vastly improving our understanding of biology and medicine. Ultivue expects the technology to be available commercially in the second half of 2016.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160502005542/en/

Dr. Michael J. Natan, President and Chief Executive Officer, at Ultivue (Photo: Business Wire)

Dr. Michael J. Natan, President and Chief Executive Officer, at Ultivue (Photo: Business Wire)

"It's great to have Michael on board as Ultivue's Chief Executive Officer. I've known Michael for over 20 years, and closely followed his seminal work at the bio/nano interface, both in academia and later in start-ups," said Co-Founder and Tufts University Professor David Walt. "He brings to Ultivue a rare combination of deep scientific understanding and a proven ability to develop and commercialize novel bioanalytical technologies and products. Michael is just the right person to bring high definition into biological imaging via Ultivue's powerful DNA-PAINT reagents."

Ultivue is based on DNA-PAINT and DNA-Exchange technologies developed at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University by Peng Yin, Ph.D., Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute and Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Ralf Jungmann, a former Postdoctoral Fellow in Yin's Wyss Institute lab, now a Group Leader at Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany.



Drs. Yin and Jungmann co-founded the company with David R. Walt, Ph.D., co-founder of Illumina and Quanterix, University Professor at Tufts University, Founding Director of Tufts Institute for Innovation, and a Howard Hughes (News - Alert) Medical Institute Professor.

"I am delighted to be leading this talented group at Ultivue who are rapidly bringing to market reagent-based solutions for high definition biology," said Dr. Natan. "The potential of transient, DNA-mediated binding of fluorophores to biological targets creates the possibility to simultaneously achieve high spatial resolution and very high multiplexing, a holy grail in bioanalysis. I believe this technology will have significant impact not only for biomedical and pre-clinical research, but for drug development and diagnostics as well."


Prior to joining Ultivue, Natan was an Executive Director, New Business Development for Cabot Corporation. In 2010, Cabot acquired Oxonica Materials Inc., for which Michael served as CEO. Prior to Oxonica, Michael was a co-founder and CEO of Nanoplex Technologies Inc. (acquired by Oxonica), and served first as CTO and then as VP, Business Development for SurroMed Inc., the first biomarker discovery company.

Natan is currently a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Midatech plc, and was a longstanding member of the Gordon Research Conference Board of Trustees (2005-2013). He has served on multiple bioanalytical advisory and review panels for NIH and NSF, and has chaired international conferences on noble metal nanoparticles and bioanalytical chemistry.

Natan started his professional career as a chemistry professor at Penn State University, where he received awards from the Beckman and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations. Natan obtained a B.S. in Chemistry with Honors from Yale University, received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from MIT (News - Alert), and was a NIH postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University.

"Michael is going to lead Ultivue to great things," said Professor Peng Yin, co-founder. "Michael is simultaneously an amazing commercial leader and technology innovator. His previous successful commercial experiences as CEO of Nanoplex Technologies Inc. and Oxonica Materials Inc., both of which involved multiplexing technologies, make him ideally suited to build Ultivue into the market leader for high multiplex biological imaging solutions, for both super resolution and standard resolution use cases. It's tremendously exciting to have him lead our team."

About Ultivue

Ultivue is a life sciences company focused on developing innovative imaging solutions to unfold new areas of biology. It produces reagents that enable researchers to obtain microscopic images at an unprecedented resolution and levels of multiplexing, vastly improving our understanding of biology and medicine. Ultivue's products are designed for fluorescent microscopy-based research and development. The patent-pending technology enables single molecule detection and visualization of a multitude of biomolecules, including proteins and nucleic acids, key drivers of cellular functions and indicators of disease states. Ultivue is based in Cambridge, MA. To learn more, visit www.ultivue.com.


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