Drug discovery · Mechanobiology

Forcyte Biotechnologies

A UCLA spinout that turned how hard a single cell squeezes into a number, then ran that number as a drug screen. The federal record is detailed through 2022. After August 2023 the company stops speaking.

A plate full of very small springs

Start with a standard 384-well plate. Inside each well sit more than 1,200 fluorescent micropatterns, each one a dot of adhesive protein printed onto a soft silicone film. A single human cell lands on a dot, grips it, and pulls. The dot shrinks. How much it shrinks is how hard that cell squeezed.

A microscope photographs an entire well in one frame. Software measures every dot. What comes out is not a stain standing in for force. It is the force, cell by cell, thousands at a time.

An application note written with Molecular Devices shows what that buys you. Twelve lines of primary human airway smooth muscle cells, six from fatally asthmatic donors and six without asthma, fit on one plate, and the instrument tracked more than 100,000 contracting single cells at four minute intervals. Mechanobiology, until then a boutique discipline done a few cells at a time, at the scale of a screening campaign.

The gap it was aimed at

A surprising number of common diseases are, at bottom, cells pulling too hard or not hard enough. Asthma is airway smooth muscle squeezing the airway shut. Fibrosis is myofibroblasts stiffening tissue until an organ stops working. Underactive bladder is detrusor muscle that will not contract enough to empty. Preterm labor is uterine muscle contracting months too early.

Industrial drug screening measured almost none of that directly. It measured surrogates: calcium flux, gene expression, a stain on a cell that had already been killed and fixed. The founding team's 2018 paper in Nature Biomedical Engineering attacked the most popular surrogate with its own data, reporting that “the calcium level is ultimately a poor quantitative predictor of cellular force generation.” The same paper carried the observation the whole company was built on: asthmatic airway cells squeeze harder and faster than healthy ones. If the disease shows up in the squeeze, screen the squeeze.

Three founders and one lab bench

Ivan Pushkarsky co-invented the technology during his bioengineering PhD at UCLA and, in the company's own words, “launched Forcyte with his advisors after graduation.” His advisor Dino Di Carlo holds an endowed chair in Engineering and Medicine at UCLA and has co-founded seven companies. Robert Damoiseaux is a UCLA professor of molecular and medical pharmacology who runs the university's Molecular Screening Shared Resource, which is to say he owns the robots.

The Los Angeles Business Journal reported in January 2019 that the firm “was founded in 2017 by UCLA bioengineering professors Ivan Pushkarsky and Dino Di Carlo, as well as Robert Damoiseaux, a UCLA professor of molecular and medical pharmacology.” One title is wrong; Pushkarsky was the graduate student. The point stands. This was an academic lab walking its instrument out the door, and the patent stayed with the University of California and was licensed back.

Grant money first, venture money later

Forcyte ran on federal small business grants for years before it ran on equity. Eleven NIH awards between fiscal 2018 and fiscal 2022 total $3,185,607 across five institutes and five disease programs: asthma and hypertension at NCATS, migraine at NCCIH, preterm birth at NICHD, cardiac contractility at NIGMS, and underactive bladder at NIDDK. The asthma and hypertension line alone accounts for $1,928,518.

The equity side arrived thinly and awkwardly. A Form D filed on January 10, 2019 reported a $2,000,000 offering with $1,000,000 already sold to three investors. Five days later the company amended it. “An attorney representing Forcyte Biotechnologies updated the securities filing on Jan. 15, after realizing the earlier filing was made in error, said company founder Ivan Pushkarsky.” The corrected figure was $160,000.

Y Combinator took the company into its Winter 2021 batch. In June 2022 Forcyte announced new money from Milestone View, Pioneer Fund, Acequia Capital, Y Combinator and Jude Gomila, without naming an amount, saying only that “Including public support, this funding brings Forcyte’s total raised to $5.7M”. No Form D was ever filed for that round.

The last essay

On August 1, 2023 the company published a long manifesto on its blog, and it reads like a company that believed it had won the argument. It claimed the platform had built “the world’s largest specifically designed and highly curated mechanobiology data repository” and that “we’ve screened >300,000 small molecule compounds across multiple unique primary human cell types”.

It is the last dated post on the site. A preprint appeared in January 2025 with seven Forcyte-affiliated authors, reporting “the first high-throughput contractility screen of an annotated kinase inhibitor library, evaluating 2,418 compounds across five primary human cell types”. No journal version has appeared since.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the science is real and on the public record. A validated high-throughput contractility assay exists, it found hits in fibrosis, and five NIH institutes paid for the work. The second half never arrived. No named pharma partner, no named target, no priced venture round on file, no clinical program. Federal grants outweigh documented equity by about twenty to one, which is a fine way to build an instrument and a hard way to fund a drug pipeline.

What to watch

• Whether the January 2025 kinase inhibitor preprint reaches a journal. It is the newest scientific output attached to the company.
• Where the UCLA patent family lands. The Regents own it; a lapsed license is the cleanest signal the company is finished.
• Whether the assay survives the company. FLECS plates were sold as research consumables, so the technology has users beyond the founders.
• Any public account from Ivan Pushkarsky, who spent five years arguing that drug discovery ignores physics. It would be worth more than an aggregator status field.

In their words

Related companies

• Notable Labs: Also in Diagnostics. A blood cancer company that screened drugs against a patient’s own cells to predict who would respond, in-licensed a shelved Boehringer Ingelheim compound, reached
• Delee: Also in Diagnostics. A Monterrey team built a machine that filters circulating tumor cells out of whole blood, published two papers on it, and raised about $2.75 million
• BillionToOne: Also in Diagnostics. A Menlo Park laboratory that counts individual DNA molecules in blood, first to tell a pregnant patient whether her fetus is at risk for a recessive disease, now to read
• X-ZELL: Also in Diagnostics. A Singapore and Bangkok company that set out to find early cancer in a 10mL blood draw, published one 146 patient prostate study, then turned the staining machine built

Sources

1. Public recordForm D and Form D/A, Forcyte Biotechnologies, Inc., CIK 0001760069SEC EDGAR · Jan 10 and Jan 15, 2019
2. Public recordNIH RePORTER, 11 awards: TR002350, AT009962, HD097002, GM146269, DK129187NIH · FY2018 to FY2022
3. Public recordUS Patent 11,592,438, force phenotyping of cellsUSPTO · issued Feb 28, 2023
4. Public recordPapers in Nature Biomedical Engineering, Assay and Drug Development Technologies, Journal of Visualized Experiments and SLAS Discovery, plus a 2025 preprintPubMed and bioRxiv
5. IndependentUPDATE: Brentwood-Based Forcyte Biotechnologies Targets $2M RaiseLos Angeles Business Journal · Jan 14, 2019
6. IndependentMechano-therapeutics Discovery Startup Forcyte Bio Secures New FundingBioSpace · Jun 1, 2022
7. IndependentForcyte Biotechnologies Secures Funding; Totals $5.7MFinSMEs · Jun 2, 2022
8. IndependentForcyte Biotechnologies company profile, status closedSeedtable · accessed Sep 23, 2026
9. IndependentForcyte Biotechnologies profile, Y Combinator W21 collectionCB Insights · accessed Sep 23, 2026
10. CompanyThe body is (also) a mechanical systemForcyte Bio blog · Aug 1, 2023
11. CompanyForcyte Bio Secures New Funding From Y Combinator and OthersBusiness Wire · Jun 1, 2022
12. PartnerHigh-throughput screening of single-cell contractile force using FLECS TechnologyMolecular Devices application note