Research tools · Dynamic single-cell analysis
CellChorus
A University of Houston spinout that films immune cells one at a time and scores how well each one kills. It has won close to $9 million of federal money, put its data in Nature Cancer, and disclosed almost no venture capital at all.
One cell at a time
Mix engineered T cells with tumor cells in a dish and you can measure how many tumor cells die. You cannot see which T cell did the killing, how long it took, whether it went on to kill again, or whether it wore out and died itself.
CellChorus takes the population apart first. Cells are loaded into nanowell arrays, in grids of 5,000 to 10,000 wells, then imaged over hours. Neural networks track every cell, flag the moment a target dies, and score contact, motility, serial killing and survival for each one. A run produces thousands of short films.
Navin Varadarajan, the University of Houston professor whose lab built the method, described the point of it to his new investor in October 2021: “Our TIMING (Time-lapse Imaging Microscopy in Nanowell Grids) platform parallelizes thousands of single-cell interactions such that scientists are now able to watch each cell live its own life.” Immune cells, he noted, travel about 10 microns a minute. Averaging them throws away the thing that matters.
Why averaging fails
CAR T cell therapy works, and then often stops working. The National Cancer Institute grant CellChorus won in 2025 puts the problem in its own abstract: a majority of patients with relapsed or refractory large B cell lymphoma respond, but most eventually progress.
The dominant single-cell tools are poorly shaped for that question. As another CellChorus grant abstract puts it, methods like flow cytometry and single-cell RNA sequencing are cell destructive, capture only a snapshot in time, or cannot assign molecular data back to the same cells whose behavior was measured. You can learn what a cell is. It is harder to learn what a cell did. That gap is the company’s market, and its customers are not hospitals but the people designing CAR constructs and proving a manufacturing batch is potent.
A professor, an oncologist and an investor
The science came from Varadarajan’s Single Cell Lab at UH, where TIMING ran for roughly a decade before anyone tried to sell it. The university holds the underlying patent and licenses it exclusively to the company. The second co-founder is Laurence Cooper, a pediatric oncologist who was a tenured professor at MD Anderson and then chief executive of the public cell therapy company now called Alaunos Therapeutics. He chairs the board.
Cooper is also how the company got a CEO. Daniel Meyer, a former venture investor at Arboretum Ventures and PJC and previously chief operating officer of Genospace, met Varadarajan through Cooper in late 2020. He told InnovationMap what he found: “The company had been established, but there were limited operations.” He took the job on September 21, 2020, and still runs the company from the Bay Area while the lab sits in Houston. Rebecca Berdeaux, formerly a tenured associate professor at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, joined in 2022 and is now chief scientific officer and principal investigator on most of the federal grants.
Grant money first, venture money second
CellChorus raised capital in an unusual order. In February 2021 it won $50,000 from Texas Halo Fund at the first Venture Houston pitch competition. That August, Y Combinator put in $125,000 and took it into the Summer 2021 batch. In October 2021 Breakout Ventures announced CellChorus as “the first seed investment out of our new fund.” That amount has never been disclosed.
Then the federal money started and did not stop. From fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2026, four NIH projects and one NSF project totalling $8.87 million funded a dedicated instrument called Chronos, ready-to-use assay kits, a label-free version of the imaging, and a Stanford collaboration on predicting CAR T response. A $200,000 BARDA-funded contract pushed the platform toward fungal pathogens in August 2025.
The board has watched this category before. Andrew Last, appointed in November 2023, is chief operating officer of Bio-Rad and was chief commercial officer of Berkeley Lights. Advisor Mimi Healy was Berkeley Lights’ chief product officer. Berkeley Lights, renamed PhenomeX, was bought by Bruker in October 2023 at a valuation of $108 million, far below where it listed. Nobody here needs telling that a beautiful instrument is not a business.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Federal grants | NIH FY2023 to FY2026 totals $8,593,743 across five projects: Chronos (NIGMS) $2,327,080; assay kits (NCATS) $2,368,994; label-free TIMING with UH (NCATS) $2,499,171; Stanford CAR T signatures (NCI) $399,625; commercialization readiness (NIGMS) $998,873. NSF adds $274,988. Total $8,868,731. | Public record |
| Federal peer review | SBIR.gov lists 5 Phase I and 3 Phase II awards, a 60 percent conversion rate, first award year 2023. | Public record |
| Anchor publication | Rezvan et al, Nature Cancer, Jul 2024, identified a CD8-fit T cell subset in lymphoma infusion products using TIMING with single-cell RNA sequencing. Co-authors span MD Anderson, Kite Pharma and Baylor. | Public record |
| Lab versus company | The heavily cited work is the lab’s, such as Romain et al, Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2022. Company-authored papers are fewer and later: Fathi et al, BioTechniques, 2022, and Todkar et al, Frontiers in Bioinformatics, 2026. | Public record |
| Publication count | Company releases since 2023 say TIMING data appear in “more than 20 peer-reviewed papers.” InnovationMap reported in May 2024 that it was “more than 200 peer-reviewed papers.” | Reporting differs |
| Named users | Indapta Therapeutics at SITC 2024, Indee Labs in a 2025 Scientific Reports paper, FuseBio at SITC 2022, Kite Pharma as a Nature Cancer co-author, Stanford as a grant partner. | Company and partner |
| Unnamed customers | “top-25 biopharmaceutical companies” and, per Y Combinator, one of the few companies with an approved CAR T cell therapy. None identified. | Company-stated |
| Uniqueness claim | Its lead investor wrote in 2021 that “CellChorus is the only company that provides live imaging of single cells.” CB Insights places it as a Challenger among fifteen in cell and tissue analysis. | Company and investor |
| Instrument | Chronos has been an SBIR deliverable since 2023 and its readiness award runs to Aug 2029. No launch, no pricing. | Public record |
| Equity capital | $125,000 from Y Combinator and $50,000 from Texas Halo Fund are the only disclosed amounts. No Form D appears on SEC EDGAR. | Not found |
Read plainly: the science has survived journal peer review and repeated NIH study sections, a harder combination than most tools companies manage. What the record does not yet show is a product. TIMING is still a service delivered from one Houston laboratory, the instrument that would change that is still a grant deliverable, and the customer list is a category rather than a set of names.
What to watch
- Whether Chronos ships. The September 2026 readiness award names Meyer himself as principal investigator, the clearest signal yet that the company means to sell hardware rather than hours.
- The Stanford work. If post-infusion signatures predict who relapses after CAR T, the platform moves toward the clinic, a far larger business.
- A named customer. The top-25 biopharma framing has run since 2021 with nobody attached to it.
In their words
“Our TIMING (Time-lapse Imaging Microscopy in Nanowell Grids) platform parallelizes thousands of single-cell interactions such that scientists are now able to watch each cell live its own life.”
Navin Varadarajan, co-founder, Breakout Ventures interview, October 2021 · Interview
“Our platform can work with as few as 10,000 cells ensuring that we can evaluate small populations of cells directly derived from patients.”
Navin Varadarajan, Breakout Ventures interview, October 2021 · Interview
“The company had been established, but there were limited operations.”
Daniel Meyer, CEO, on joining in 2020, to InnovationMap, June 2023 · Independent
“Developers of immunotherapies need better functional data earlier so that they can develop and deliver better therapies.”
Daniel Meyer, to InnovationMap, June 2023 · Independent
“We are excited to introduce you to CellChorus, the first seed investment out of our new fund.”
Renee Shenton, Breakout Ventures, October 2021 · Investor
“Our results showed that a subset of T cells, labeled as CD8-fit T cells, are capable of high motility and serial killing, found uniquely in patients with clinical response.”
Ali Rezvan, first author, Nature Cancer, quoted by the University of Houston, May 2024 · Independent
“Predicting which patients will achieve durable responses after CAR-T therapy remains one of the most important challenges in the field.”
David Miklos, MD, Stanford Medicine, quoted by InnovationMap, May 2026 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordNIH RePORTER: R44GM149106, R44TR005137, R42TR005299, R43CA298411, SB1GM163323
- Public recordNSF SBIR Phase I award 2229323
- Public recordSBIR.gov portfolio, CELLCHORUS INC
- Public recordIdentification of a clinically efficacious CAR T cell subset in diffuse large B cell lymphoma
- Public recordA role for CD2-CD58 interactions in clinical antitumor T cell responses
- Public recordCytotoxic T lymphocytes targeting a conserved SARS-CoV-2 spike epitope
- Public recordLabel-free TIMING: an AI workflow for cell-cell interaction profiling
- InterviewThe power of single-cell analysis
- IndependentHouston biotech startup secures $2.3M grant
- IndependentHouston health tech startup scores $2.5M SBIR grant
- IndependentHouston health tech co. lands NIH grant for AI cancer prediction tool
- IndependentInaugural Houston Venture pitch competition names big winners
- IndependentOptimal Cancer-Killing T Cells Discovered
- IndependentTechnology developed at UH could advance treatment of lymphoma
- IndependentCellChorus profile, competitors and patents
- CompanyCellChorus names Daniel Meyer Chief Executive Officer
- CompanyCellChorus raises funding from Y Combinator
- CompanyBioTools Innovator VANGUARD awards CellChorus contract
- CompanyCellChorus company, technology and publications pages
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
