Company: Kromatid inc.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Small biz TECH STARTUP

INITIAL LIGHT BULB: Four professors from Colorado State University--Susan Bailey, Joel Bedford, Edwin Goodwin and Andrew Ray--and Michael Cornforth at University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, spun their decades of research into a startup to make it easier for their peers to identify genetic abnormalities.

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"There's a specific aberration known as an inversion of DNA," says CEO Christopher Tompkins, a veteran of the pharmaceutical industry. "It is simply inversion of DNA in a strand, and it's very difficult to detect. It can indicate any congenital genetic disease" --i.e. anything from autism and other developmental disorders to cancer.

KromaTiD's technology--in a sense an intelligent dye--allows scientists to visually see where the DNA is--and isn't--normal.

IN A NUTSHELL: KromaTiD's innovation involves glow-in-the-dark chromosome paints that can be used to analyze a single strand of DNA at a time, ultimately delivering higher quality results at a lower price.

"What KromaTid is doing is putting together a set of tools to find specific chromosome damages," Tompkins says, describing a dye that visually indicates DNA inversions when excited under an electron microscope. Normal DNA glows, but inverted sequences do not. "If there's no damage, you have a beautiful solid purple color. Where you have damage, there's a gap. The corresponding spot lights up on the opposite strand."

Tompkins says the technology allows medical researchers "to look for a damage they've never looked for before," ultimately allowing for the development of narrowly targeted therapies.

"Once you know the gene the cause is stemming from, they can track that back to a specific enzyme or specific mechanism,"...