I'll give you the exact moment--January 2020, garage in Jacksonville. My healthy 33-year-old friend died from a staph infection she got from a public door handle. It went from her ear to her brain in days. My husband Chris and I aren't engineers or scientists, we just started tinkering with UVC LEDs and door handle prototypes because I couldn't accept that touching a doorknob should be a death sentence. The hardest part wasn't the technology--it was proving automatic disinfection could work in 5 seconds or less. Manual cleaning leaves gaps between cycles, and nobody's going to wait 30 seconds at every door. We built self-sealing UVC chambers that activate after each touch. Boston University's lab confirmed we killed COVID in one second, and University of Arizona testing showed 99.999% kill rates (5.31 log reduction average) against everything from MRSA to norovirus in 5-7 seconds. The real challenge was changing how facilities think about infection prevention. Hospitals spend billions on HAIs--54,000 people die daily from preventable infectious diseases according to CDC--but they're used to protocols, not automatic systems. We had to show pediatricians and infection control directors actual field data proving GermPass handles high-volume touchpoints that manual cleaning can't keep up with. Dr. Affan at Angel Kids became our first believer after seeing restroom stall tests. Now we're preventing infections in patient rooms, elevators, and immunocompromised areas without chemicals or human intervention. Started in grief, solved with garage tinkering, scaled with data. That's how you translate loss into lives saved.
Our successful translation wasn't about discovering a new revolutionary cancer drug, but the underlying procedure that enable such discoveries. We observed that the "scratch assay", also known as wound healing or cell migration assay, a cornerstone technique for studying cancer metastasis and wound healing, was being performed manually with a pipette tip. The researcher has to take a pipette tip for each well on a 48 / 96 well plate and create scratches one by one; spending up to 10 min per plate and causing massive data variability (up to 50% CV), wase in time and money, as well as resulting in irreproducible data from the study. CLYTE translated this observation into CytCut. We engineered a mechanical device that replaces the unsteady human hand with precision guides. By fixing the angle and force of the scratch, we successfully turned a subjective, error-prone art into a standardized scientific process. Through 4 cycles of beta testing with 6 labs, we proved that this simple tool could lower variability to under 15% and cut prep time from 10 minutes to just 20 seconds. Our biggest challenge was engineering automation-level precision at a handheld price point. We knew that automated robots could solve this problem, but they cost $20,000+ and require complex infrastructure, making them inaccessible to 90% of labs. Our challenge was to achieve that same "robotic" consistency—creating identical scratches across a multi-well plate simultaneously—using a purely mechanical, durable, and affordable tool (<$350). Achieving this required rigorous material science engineering. We had to iterate through high-resolution prototyping (using materials like ABS and ASA) to ensure the device could withstand sterilization (ethanol/UV) and repeated use for over 9 months without losing dimensional accuracy. We had to prove to a skeptical scientific community that they didn't need a robot to get reproducible data; they just needed better engineering in their hands. CLYTE Technologies is an AI-powered biotech startup, dedicated to revolutionizing biomedical research. We solve the "daily grind" of basic research behind life saving biomedical discoveries with smarter tools: CytCut, a precision device that standardizes wound healing assays for reliable data, and Soph (Sophie) AI, an intelligent assistant that streamlines research study protocol generation and data analysis. Learn more at https://www.clyte.tech/about