Celebrating One Year of Growth and Collaboration
"PTI was exceptionally grateful to have the community that has supported it since its inception come together to celebrate one year at a gathering last week, and looks forward to the future."
In March 2023, Parallel Squared Technology Institute (PTI) embarked on a journey towards building an institute that can increase the throughput of accurate and specific protein analysis by 100-1000 fold. Since then, PTI has nucleated a bold team and initiated productive collaborations. PTI also matured from a department of Convergent Research to independence as an LLC.
Over the last year, the team has grown from the three co-founders to a team of scientists and operations professionals from around the world: including new team members from Texas, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. The nucleation of teams that can tackle problems outside the scope of academia or industry is the mission of the Focused Research Organizations (FROs), such as PTI, that Convergent Research helps to fund and incubate. Last March, PTI was fortunate enough to announce substantial funding support from Schmidt Futures and Ken Griffin towards using proteomics technology to address long-standing challenges in aging and Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
Dr. Nikolai Slavov, Director of PTI, welcoming everyone to our celebration.
The crux of Parallel Squared’s innovation is combining chemistry and machine learning approaches to allow processing from 100s to 1000s more small biological samples than currently possible. From single cells to small tumor and brain samples, the “plexDIA” approach was pioneered by the team of the institute’s founding director, Dr. Nikolai Slavov. It promises to unlock new experimental paradigms, allowing researchers to ask questions not currently possible, such as how the protein pathology of AD progresses at high spatial resolution and how 10,000s of immune cells respond to infection with their protein machinery.
Dr. Adam Marblestone, CEO of Convergent Research, saying a few words about PTI.
At the core of PTI’s ethos is a commitment to open science and community, so PTI was exceptionally grateful to have the community that has supported it since its inception come together to celebrate one year at a gathering last week. Cheers to everyone!
The lobby of PTI's headquarters in Watertown, MA.
