FlexiGrace Bio is developing instrumentation designed to make tissue preparation more reliable, more consistent, and more accessible — so better experiments lead to better outcomes.
Stay in the Loop →Single-cell analysis, spatial biology, and next-generation sequencing have opened up extraordinary possibilities in research. But the very first step — mechanically or enzymatically breaking tissue down into viable cells — is still a bottleneck that hasn't meaningfully improved in decades. It is holding back innovation.
We've spent time with researchers at academic medical centers, pharmaceutical companies, core facilities, and CROs. Across every setting, we heard the same frustrations — backed by real numbers.
A single failed dissociation run can set a lab back at least 1–6 weeks (sometimes 6 months or more) and $500 to $50,000+ in wasted reagents, staff time, and irreplaceable samples. This isn't a rare edge case. It's a recurring cost of doing business.
The most widely used dissociation platforms cap out at 8 samples per run. For core facilities managing dozens of requests, or high-throughput labs scaling up, that ceiling is a daily constraint.
Working with a tissue type your lab hasn't processed before? Expect months of protocol development before you get reliable results. For non-standard samples — tumor biopsies, marine organisms, complex organ tissue — there often isn't even a starting point.
Cell viability after dissociation routinely falls to 30% or below. When you're working with a biopsy that can't be replaced, that variability isn't just frustrating — it can end a study, or worse, harm patient outcomes.
Researchers working with aquatic species, agricultural tissue, or other non-standard samples have largely been left to build their own protocols from scratch. The commercial market hasn't caught up.
FlexiGrace Bio is building a tissue dissociation solution that addresses these problems at the source — improving yield consistency, reducing the time and effort required to optimize for new tissue types, and opening up sample categories that existing tools can't handle.
We're not here to make a marginal improvement to what already exists. We're rethinking how this step works — because when tissue preparation is more reliable, everything downstream gets better. And that ultimately means better outcomes for patients and for science.
We're early. We know that. What we also know is that the researchers who live with this problem every day are the most important people in the room. Their input has shaped everything we've learned so far — and it will keep shaping what we build. If you work in a lab, advise in the space, or just want to follow where this goes, we'd like to stay in touch.
We'll share updates worth reading. That's it.
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