Creating products to diagnose diseases

What: NanoString Technologies, Seattle

Who: Brad Gray, president and chief executive officer

Mission: Conduct medical research and create diagnostic products that help understand disease processes, helping physicians design more effective treatments.

Employees: 75.

Financials: The privately held company does not disclose its financials.

Seattle roots: NanoString's products are based on a digital molecular bar-coding technology invented at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. NanoString was founded in 2003 with an exclusive license to develop and market that technology. The initial product is the nCounter Analysis System.

Targeting cancer: Customers use the technology "to study the differences between different cancers at the DNA level so that we can understand how different patients ought to be treated differently or to identify different targets for which we might develop drugs," Gray said.

"Cancers have genetics that have gone haywire compared to the rest of normal tissue. So the question is, 'What is the particular genetic abnormality that's driving the growth of this particular cancer.' "

Massive analysis: Gray said the product allows researchers to perform more analyses in limited time.

Next markets: The company is looking to take the product out of research labs and into hospitals and clinics.

"Many of our customers are discovering with our instrument important, insightful correlations between, for instance, the genetics of cancer and how patients should be treated," said Gray.

"We'd like to take those insights and make them into medical-device products that we can then place in hospital and clinics and help physicians treat patients more effectively."

— Patrick Marshall