Zephyrus Biosciences: Leading the Commercializing Process Yourself
Company founded: 2013
Founders: UC Berkeley Professor Amy Herr, Kelly Gardner (UC Berkeley, Ph.D., 2012, Bioengineering), Josh Molho, Douglas Crawford
As a UC Berkeley bioengineering professor, Amy E. Herr sees creating startups as an essential part of being a scientist in the twenty-first century. “We don’t confine ourselves to the lab,” she says. “Our goal is to ultimately improve people’s lives, so we work to ensure that the technology gets into the hands of the people whose lives we want to improve. Sometimes that means leading the process of commercialization yourself.” In 2013, that’s what Herr and Kelly Gardner, then a bioengineering PhD student, did when they cofounded Zephyrus Biosciences to commercialize a research tool for single-cell analysis that enables high-resolution biology.
After licensing the intellectual property from UC Berkeley, in 2014 Zephyrus raised a seed round of $1.5 million from investors that included Mission Bay Capital, then affiliated with QB3. Also in 2014, the startup received $300,000 in grants from the US National Institutes of Health and UC Berkeley’s Bakar Fellows Program. The company launched operations in the QB3 Garage incubator in UC Berkeley’s Stanley Hall.
Zephyrus’s first product, called Milo, was a benchtop instrument that allowed researchers to search for specific proteins in about a thousand cells at once. For the first time this enabled the Western Blotting analytic technique to analyze individual cells. The resulting high-throughput and high-selectivity protein fingerprinting gave scientists a way to understand variability within tumors and to deliver new insights into the biology of stem cells, neurology, and human diseases such as cancer.
In 2016, The Scientist magazine named Zephyrus’s technology a “#1 Innovation.” In March of that year the global life sciences company Bio-Techne Corporation acquired Zephyrus. In response to the acquisition, Gardner said, “We are excited to join Bio-Techne and bring our system into the ProteinSimple family of products. This deal provides an excellent path forward for commercialization of the single cell Western Blot technology. The market reach of Bio-Techne will enable Zephyrus to rapidly reach the broad market of researchers who need to study proteins at the single cell level.”1
Herr has gone on to serve many I&E leadership and mentorship roles. She was founding director of UC Berkeley’s Bakar BioEnginuity Hub and faculty director of UC Berkeley’s Bakar Fellows Program. As of 2025, Herr was vice president of the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Network, leading the network’s efforts to advance technologies to observe, measure, and analyze human biology in action.
1 “Bio-Techne Corporation Agrees to Acquire Zephyrus Biosciences, Inc.,” PR Newswire, March 21, 2016, www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bio-techne-corporation-agrees-to-acquire-zephyrus-biosciences-inc-300238781.html.
Published in Startup Campus: How UC Berkeley Became an Unexpected Leader in Entrepreneurship and Startups, August 2025
