As we probably all have experienced, time has this very peculiar tendency to sometimes seem like it cannot go by fast enough – only to then wake up one day and realize that an entire decade has passed. An entire decade – an exciting timeframe full of adventure, challenges and numerous great team achievements for our company. With the conclusion of 2019 we are proud to celebrate the 10 years of Cytosurge and would like to use the occasion to look back at the early days of our venture. We have come a long way since we originally founded our company back in 2009 and I am very proud to share some of our highlights and challenges with you in this blog. 

Whenever engineers look at another field of research to find technology driven solutions to address some of the most pressing problems, interesting things can happen. This was also very much the case with Cytosurge. Coming from a background in force microscopy, material science and electrical engineering, Mike Gabi and myself were fascinated by the idea of using force feedback to better control and guide the movements of a micro/nano pipette, a truly well-established tool in the field of medicine and biology. Combining the advantages of atomic force microscopy with the capabilities and application areas of micro pipettes seemed to be a very interesting concept.

And yes, we have truly come a long way since our first publication appeared in the journal Nanoletters back in 2009. Motivated by the numerous positive feedbacks and inquiries from our peers in the scientific community, we decided that it was the right time to establish our own company with the vision to bring this new tool into the labs of scientists and research oriented companies around the world. We are very proud today to be able to say that we have 85 FluidFM installations spread across the globe and count some of the most prestigious corporations and academic institutions to our loyal and very active customer base. Over 70 high impact publications have resulted over the last few years and the story of FluidFM has truly only just started.

In the time that has passed since then, Cytosurge has continuously been driving forward the maturity of our products and has carried out major investments to bring the quality of our products up to the level that is expected from a Swiss precision industry company. Luckily the days where it felt like every second probe did not function properly  are very much behind us.

We are also very proud to announce that Cytosurge has recently acquired all IP rights related to FluidFM. The company now owns a comprehensive patent portfolio of 7 key technologies that form the basis of our core competences – an important prerequisite to continue investing into the development of FluidFM in the future. I am very proud that Cytosurge has managed to achieve this important milestone.

With the launch of our AFM partnership program in 2018, the company has established a highly successful framework to realize our vision of establishing FluidFM as a routine tool within the AFM community. Our partnership with several major AFM manufacturers around the world allowed us to bring FluidFM into many new labs in a way that allows our customers to leverage their existing AFM investments via tailor-made AFM ADD-ON packages. Thanks to our close collaboration with our AFM Partners Nanosurf and Bruker/JPK, we can now supply a very affordable FluidFM solution for many of their popular Bio-AFM platforms used in labs around the globe. The program has so far been a tremendous success – our customer base has grown more than double every year since we on-boarded our first partner and I am very excited to say that we plan to support many more AFM platforms in the future. Our work here has only just begun.

What has also increasingly become clear over the last few years is our transition from a small “garage-like” two-man company to a well-established bio-nanotechnology company with over 600m2 of office, laboratory, QC and production space in our HQ in Zurich. Our business model of selling platforms and specialized probe solutions has been well received by our customers and we plan to bring it to many more exciting fields in times ahead. With the launch of our FluidFM BOT BIO Series line of products, we have entered a completely new market outside of the traditional AFM sphere and have already received great feedback from our customers for this step.

The FluidFM BOT BIO Series marks a comprehensive line of turnkey system solutions tailored specifically to solving some of the most pressing issues in the field of life sciences. The FluidFM BOT Bio Series builds on the experience that we have collected since our very first product launched in 2013, and we are very proud of what we have achieved.

To achieve this vision of a bottom up cell-based assay without the need for expensive high throughput equipment, the FluidFM BOT BIO Series has been developed over the last few years by considering the numerous feedbacks from the markets. We expect this range of products to contribute and push back some important boundaries in science for many disciplines such as genetic editing via CRISPR-CAS, cell line engineering as well as the exciting field of stem cell-based therapies in the future.

Cytosurge has matured into a well-established company. In order to succeed with the growth of our company in line with our exciting vision for the future, we must continue to use the same successful ingredients. Our company is a great place to work (the employees say it, not me!) and we are very proud about our agile mindset - from the very first draft for a new product, all the way through to supporting our customers when they work with one of our systems. Establishing a culture of trust in order to empower all our employees to achieve great results is key to this and I would like to thank the entire Cytosurge Team for the great work they have done over the last 10 years. Only when working together as a team, each one contributing to the best of his/her abilities, a key leading-edge technology as complex as FluidFM can successfully tackle the difficult journey from the engineering lab into the hands of our customers.

With this I would like to conclude my short trip down memory lane and invite you to become a part of our journey, both as a customer or a future member of our team. In 2020 we plan some special activities and announcements to celebrate our first 10 years together with you. In the meantime, I would like to thank you all very much for your support as an investor, a customer, a member of our team or just by giving us feedback and asking us some critical questions at the right time. 😊 Without all of you, our company would not be at the point that we are now and we are very grateful to be able to continue writing the success story of FluidFM technology together with you.

Happy Birthday Cytosurge!

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Pascal Behr, CEO