LUMICKS to return COVID-related relief funding to Dutch and US governments

Funds played a key role in positioning LUMICKS for future success

AMSTERDAM, May 18, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- LUMICKS, a leading next generation life science tools company renowned for its innovative platforms for Dynamic Single-Molecule and Cell Avidity analysis, announces that it has made the decision to return the COVID-related relief funding it received in both the Netherlands and the United States. During 2020, LUMICKS received a total of $1.7 million from the Dutch NOW subsidy and $163,830 from the US Payroll Protection Program.

Olivier Heyning, LUMICKS's CEO, said: "The decision to voluntarily return the relief funds that we received both in the Netherlands and the US reflects LUMICKS' values and our desire to create a fairer and better society. We received these funds when we experienced a challenging trading environment due to academic labs cutting back their investment and activities because of the pandemic. We are fortunate that the strong global interest in life science research has placed LUMICKS in a position of robust recovery. This progress and the growing customer interest in our cutting-edge technologies, such as z-Movi^® Cell Avidity Analyzer for use in immunology, has allowed LUMICKS to raise further substantial funding from an international syndicate of specialized life sciences investors recently. I would like to thank both the Dutch and US governments for their prompt action in making this critical funding available and to highlight how important it has been in providing us with short term continuity, allowing LUMICKS to stay focused on building the long-term opportunity." 

About LUMICKS

LUMICKS is a leading life science tools company that develops equipment for Dynamic Single-Molecule and Cell Avidity analysis, two rapidly emerging areas in biology research and immuno-oncology. Built upon innovative technologies, such as optical tweezers (Nobel Prize for Physics 2018) and STED super-resolution (Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2014), LUMICKS tools facilitate the understanding of life to the smallest detail.

LUMICKS tools allow researchers to build the crucial and yet unfinished bridge between structure and function at both a molecular and a cellular level. This is achieved by applying and measuring forces around biological interactions, enabling the detailed real-time analysis of underlying biological mechanisms. LUMICKS' groundbreaking C-Trap^® Optical Tweezers – Fluorescence & Label-free Microscopy, allows scientists for the first time to analyze complex biological processes in real-time. Similarly, z-Movi^® Cell Avidity Analyzer enables the measurement and selection of immune cells based on their real-time interactions with target cells. The company was founded in 2014 as an academic spin-off from the research group of Prof. Gijs Wuite, Prof. Erwin Peterman, and Prof. Iddo Heller at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. For more information, visit the company's website at www.lumicks.com.

For more information contact:

Name: Kassandra Barbetsea, PR & Marketing
Phone: +31 (0) 63 482 09 48
Email: PR@lumicks.com