Hugo de Wit: Building futuristic tools to deepen cellular understanding
How LUMICKS used market feedback to engineer its next-gen optical tweezers
What does the tool do?
It’s called the C-Trap, because you trap molecules. DNA is folded inside tiny cells, making it hard to test. Using C-Trap, which is two laser beams operating like optical tweezers, you can stretch and bend DNA, mimicking how it moves. You can see a protein in action and film it. How fast is it moving along that DNA? How is it interacting with or binding to the DNA? It’s really a bit of science fiction, and absolutely mesmerizing.
When is the ideal moment for this evolution?
Right after your first sale with a customer, because you’re going to learn so much from that customer and every one after. You have to make the customer perspective the driving force for all your decisions as a company. If you don’t, you run a big risk of making the wrong decisions and slowing down the growth of the company.
We’re now going back to talk to customers to help define a clear value proposition for Lumicks. We’re getting clearer on where we need to go — we want to become part of the industry standard workflow with our tool for cell therapy discovery — but it’s still a work in progress.
And I should mention that Monday-morning quarterbacking is the easiest thing to do, to look back and say “Oh, this should have happened.” When you’re in the trenches, not everything happens the way it’s supposed to. I’ve been there myself.
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