Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

We caught-up yesterday with Dan Close, Chief Scientific Officer of Knoxville-based 490 BioTech. The company, which won the PYA-sponsored inaugural “Tom Ballard Innovation Award” earlier this year, is an active participant in the “BIO Digital 2021” virtual conference underway.

“It is shaping-up to be a great experience for 490 BioTech,” Close told us. “We have meetings scheduled with large and small pharma companies, contract research organizations, and even academic institutions. It’s our mission to bring our better drug development technology to anyone who can use it to improve lives, and the virtual format of this year’s meeting has given us the chance to do that on a global scale.”

Just into the second day of the weeklong event, Close had already introduced the company’s products to new customers, caught-up with friends he had met at previous meetings, and received great feedback about what 490 BioTech’s customers want to see from its R&D pipeline.

“This year is especially exciting because we’re using the opportunity to introduce two new lines of products,” he said. “In addition to the glowing human cells we’ve been marketing for drug development, we’re now offering a LiveLight Toxicity Assay Kit that allows our customers to make any cell glow for up to week or more, and a series of LiveLight Xenograft cell lines for cancer research.”

Close added that 490 BioTech is “continuing to develop innovative new products that will one day provide a comprehensive suite of tools for pre-clinical drug development, so more new products will keep coming throughout 2021 and 2022.”

BIO is the world’s largest advocacy organization representing biotechnology companies, academic institutions, state biotechnology centers and related organizations across the U.S. and in more than 30 other nations. BIO members are involved in the research and development of innovative healthcare, agricultural, industrial, and environmental biotechnology products.

---