Cleveland Clinic spinoff and specialized clinical research organization Renovo Neural is adding a new service line that will allow research clients to gather data on biological tissue samples quickly and at a highly detailed level.
Next month, the Cleveland-based company will begin providing 3-dimensional electron microscopy (3D-EM) services, making Renovo the only commercial provider of the service in the country, company president Satish Medicetty said.
“This is a niche market that has not been explored in the past,” Medicetty said. “Adding this service will give us a big business advantage and help us grow quickly.”
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The company is initially looking to sell the service to neuroscience research clients, but hopes to eventually sell to the entire biological research market and later expand to materials science.
Among the biggest advantages Renovo’s 3D-EM service will provide to clients is speed. The technology — and Renovo’s expertise with it — will allow the company to provide extremely detailed data and nanoscale images within days instead of months, according to Medicetty.
Company founder Bruce Trapp, chairman of the Cleveland Clinic’s department of neuroscience, and scientific advisor Grahame Kidd, a Clinic neuroscience researcher, have more than two decades of experience in electron microscopy with neural tissues. “Not too many people can make sense of these detailed images,” Medicetty said.
Renovo hasn’t signed any clients yet for its 3D-EM service, but is in talks with several potential customers, Medicetty said.
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Renovo will make an early marketing push of its new service line at a multiple sclerosis conference later this month in Amsterdam called ECTRIMS 2011. Medicetty calls it a “who’s who” of the MS community, and no other community is probably more important to Renovo.
That’s because the company’s primary business involves acting as an MS clinical research organization, performing preclinical development work for bigger drug firms by screening small molecules to discover whether they could be the basis for a new MS therapy.
Renovo got its start in 2008, thanks to a $3 million state grant from Ohio’s technology acceleration program Third Frontier. Its drug-screening technology is based on work by Trapp and Wendy Macklin, a former Clinic researcher.
