Research tools · Mass spectrometry
Andson Biotech
A Georgia Tech spinout selling a benchtop chip that cleans protein samples on their way into a mass spectrometer. The product has been on sale since June 2025, the federal grants are real, and the customer list is still private.
Ninety-nine percent of the salt
In a Georgia Tech cleanroom in 2018, a graduate student named Mason Chilmonczyk was building a device with channels five microns tall. A membrane with nanoscale pores ran between two streams of fluid: on one side a messy sample drawn straight out of a bioreactor, on the other clean water carrying conditioning chemicals.
Salt is small and diffuses through the pores. Proteins are large and stay behind. Run the two streams past each other and the sample comes out ready for a mass spectrometer.
His group measured what that trade cost. The process, Georgia Tech reported at the time, “can currently remove as much as 99 percent of the salt, while retaining 80 percent of the biomolecules.” Sample volumes ran as low as 20 nanoliters.
“We have used advanced microfabrication techniques to create a microfluidic device that will be able to treat samples in less than a minute,” Chilmonczyk said then. “Traditional sample preparation can require hours to days.”
That device, the Dynamic Mass Spectrometry Probe, is the ancestor of everything Andson Biotech sells today.
The bottleneck nobody photographs
Mass spectrometry is the reference method for working out what a biologic drug actually is: which glycoforms are present, whether an antibody is folded correctly, how much drug hangs off a conjugate. Every modern modality, from monoclonal antibodies to mRNA to adeno associated viruses, gets weighed on one.
The instrument is not the slow part. The queue in front of it is. Native mass spectrometry, which keeps proteins folded so you see structure rather than fragments, needs the protein in a volatile buffer such as ammonium acetate. Real samples arrive in phosphate buffered saline, in formulation buffers, in spent culture media full of detergents. Getting from one to the other by spin filter or size exclusion column takes, by Andson’s own account, an hour or more per sample, by hand.
So a technique treated as the gold standard in a research paper stays out of the place where it would matter most: the manufacturing floor, where a batch of cells is either healthy or is not, and somebody has to decide today.
“The way that the production of cell therapeutics is done today is very much an art,” said Andrei Fedorov, the Georgia Tech professor who ran the lab and co-founded the company.
A pulp and paper accident
Chilmonczyk arrived at Georgia Tech meaning to become a professor. He joined Fedorov’s lab to work on mass spectrometry for pulp and paper manufacturing. Funding from the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies pulled the work sideways into biopharma.
“We swapped out pulp and paper manufacturing for biopharma,” he told a Georgia Tech writer in March 2026. “It was an accident, but a good one.”
The two began exploring commercialization in 2019, incorporated, and started pitching. It went badly for a long time. “You fail 300 times before you raise millions of dollars.” What did not change was the thesis: “The idea hasn’t really changed much since 2019.”
Prototype to product
Early money came from Georgia Tech’s Biolocity program and the Georgia Research Alliance, then Y Combinator in Winter 2022, then the inaugural cohort of the Merck Digital Sciences Studio. The seed closed in March 2024 at $3.6 million, led by the investor Glenn H. Epstein. The buyers were not funds: thirty seven investors put in $3.6 million, an average of about $97,000 each.
The board is an Atlanta hardware board. Two directors, Thomas O’Brien and James Ross, founded Axion BioSystems in Atlanta in 2008, also on technology licensed from Georgia Tech. O’Brien is Andson’s executive chairman.
DynaChip X1 launched at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry meeting in Baltimore in June 2025, from booth 212, behind seven posters. A second round followed that October. In September 2026 the National Institutes of Health converted Andson’s SBIR Phase I into a Phase II worth $1,403,671.
“We have an effective team that is a blend of young talent and industry veterans that has gone from prototype to product in 12 months,” Chilmonczyk said in the October 2025 release.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Form D filings | Two, both Rule 506(b) equity, CIK 0002017131. Mar 26, 2024: $3,600,000 offered and sold, 37 investors. Oct 22, 2025: $5,000,000 offered, $4,735,000 sold, 29 investors. Both report revenue as Decline to Disclose. | Public record |
| NIH SBIR Phase I | 1R43GM159530-01, NIGMS, $302,671, Aug 2, 2025 to Feb 1, 2027. Principal investigator Casey E. Vantucci. Real-time mass spectrometry for in-process monitoring and cell state analysis. | Public record |
| NIH SBIR Phase II | 1R44GM165164-01, NIGMS, $1,403,671, Sep 3, 2026 to Feb 29, 2028. Same investigator. Automated sample preparation for high throughput characterization of biotherapeutics. Awarded three weeks before this page was compiled. | Public record |
| FDA and clinical trials | No 510(k), no PMA, no registered trial. Correct for the category: bench equipment, not a patient-facing device. | Public record |
| Peer reviewed work on DynaChip | None found. PubMed returns one related paper, Biomicrofluidics, January 2024, by Slusher, Kottke, Culberson, Chilmonczyk and Fedorov: a Georgia Tech laboratory paper on the underlying approach, not an outside validation of the product. | Not found |
| Performance data | Conference posters and a company application note. The note runs NIST antibody reference material 8671 on a Waters Xevo G2 QTof and a ThermoFisher Q Exactive UHMR, against spin filters, and reports “A 5x improved efficiency was observed by streamlining sample preparation and introduction into a single step”. | Company-stated |
| Speed claims across time | April 2024: “delivering productivity gains of up to 100x”. The 2026 application note: 5x on native workflow time. May 2026: “enabling sample-to-result workflows in under 15 minutes”. The scopes differ, but the headline number has come down a long way. | Claims differ |
| Customers | None named anywhere. Target segments given to Hypepotamus in October 2025: large biopharma and biotechs, contract development and manufacturing organizations, academic investigators. No unit count or pilot site disclosed. | Not found |
| Headcount | Three to ten by August 2025 (Georgia Life Sciences); “The team currently has eleven employees, eight of whom are based in Atlanta” (October 2025); about a dozen in March 2026. | Independent |
| Recognition | Golden Helix Deal of the Year, Georgia Life Sciences, August 2025. BioTools Innovator 2023 finalist. | Independent |
Read plainly: the money and the grants are documented, the science traces back to a 2018 peer reviewed paper on the precursor device, and the product is demonstrated in public at the field’s biggest meetings. The layer in between is missing. No outside laboratory has published a DynaChip comparison, no customer has been named, and every performance number in circulation comes from Andson’s own notes and posters. Two years into selling, that is normal. It is also the gap the next twelve months either closes or does not.
What to watch
- A DynaChip paper with an outside corresponding author. Posters are marketing; a method a stranger can reproduce is evidence.
- The Phase II SBIR, running to February 29, 2028.
- A named customer, a named manufacturing partner, or an instrument vendor co-marketing deal.
- DynaMARK, the analytics product announced in April 2024, absent from every release since.
In their words
“The way that the production of cell therapeutics is done today is very much an art.”
Andrei Fedorov, co-founder, Georgia Tech News Center, 2018 · Independent
“We have used advanced microfabrication techniques to create a microfluidic device that will be able to treat samples in less than a minute.”
Mason Chilmonczyk, then a graduate research assistant, Georgia Tech News Center, 2018 · Independent
“It really changes the game because it unlocks the capabilities of mass spectrometry to serve as an actual process analytical technology, not just an R&D tool that only Ph.D. scientists can use to do deep characterization.”
Mason Chilmonczyk, CEO, Georgia Tech Woodruff School, 2022 · Independent
“You fail 300 times before you raise millions of dollars.”
Mason Chilmonczyk, Georgia Tech Woodruff School, 2026 · Independent
“We have an effective team that is a blend of young talent and industry veterans that has gone from prototype to product in 12 months.”
Mason Chilmonczyk, October 2025 funding release · Company release
“Our goal is to empower biomanufacturers with real-time data that enhances control, scalability, and ultimately, patient outcomes.”
Casey Vantucci, senior scientist and SBIR principal investigator, October 2025 release · Company release
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, Andson Biotech Inc., CIK 0002017131
- Public recordForm D, Andson Biotech Inc., CIK 0002017131
- Public recordNIH RePORTER 1R43GM159530-01
- Public recordNIH RePORTER 1R44GM165164-01
- Public recordMicrofluidics enabled multi-omics triple-shot mass spectrometry for cell-based therapies
- Not foundFDA 510(k) and PMA databases and ClinicalTrials.gov, no Andson record
- IndependentMicrofluidic Molecular Exchanger Helps Control Therapeutic Cell Manufacturing
- IndependentNew Startup Makes Developing Gene Therapies Faster and Easier
- IndependentEngineering a Faster Path to Life-Saving Therapies
- IndependentY Combinator-backed Andson Biotech in Atlanta raises $5 Million
- IndependentGeorgia Life Sciences Names 2025 Golden Helix Award Winners
- IndependentAndson Biotech raises $4.7 million in capital
- IndependentOur History, naming Tom O’Brien and Jim Ross as founders
- CompanyAndson Biotech Raises $3.6M Seed Round
- CompanyAndson Biotech Secures $5.0M in Funding to Accelerate Commercialization
- CompanyAndson Biotech Launches DynaChip X1 at ASMS 2025
- CompanyRapid Online Buffer Exchange for Complex Native Biological Analysis, application note
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
