About AmberGen
About AmberGen

About AmberGen

Building Upon Three Decades of Scientific Excellence

AmberGen is a privately held, Boston-area company that enables pioneering discoveries in the life sciences by solving key problems that limit progress in biotechnology and medicine. Our approach combines patented techniques in proteomics, mass spectrometry and light-based control of biomolecules to innovate in the fields of spatial biology, diagnostics and therapeutics.

1993: The company was founded to commercialize pioneering photonic technology developed in the Molecular Biophysics Laboratory of Professor Kenneth Rothschild and the Photonics Center at Boston University.

1995-1998: Photocleavable biotin labeling reagents and photocleavable biotin phosphoramidites were introduced by AmberGen enabling researchers to readily isolate and photorelease proteins and oligonucleotides from complex mixtures (1, 2).

1999: AmberGen developed photocleavable peptide-DNA mass-tags, and in collaboration with Franz Hillenkamp’s group at the University of Münster, demonstrated the first application of photocleavable mass-tags to DNA analysis using MALDI-MS (3).

2002: AmberGen demonstrated photochemical control of the infectivity of adenoviral vectors using novel photocleavable biotinylation reagents (4).

2011: SomaLogic, Inc. (now Standard BioTools) licensed AmberGen’s PC-biotin Phosphoramidite technology for use with its innovative SomaScan® proteomics platform.

2016: AmberGen introduces proteome-wide drug screening using mass spectrometric imaging of its patented photocleavable mass-tag bead arrays (5).

2021: AmberGen introduced Miralys™ MALDI-IHC spatial biology imaging to the world via the publication “Highly Multiplexed Immunohistochemical MALDI-MS Imaging of Biomarkers in Tissues” in the Journal of the American Society of Mass Spectrometry (6).

2022: AmberGen made the first sales of Miralys MALDI-IHC imaging reagents and accepted a minority investment from Bruker Corporation.

2023: Miralys was widely adopted by the worldwide mass spectrometric imaging (MSI) community for high-plex, multiomic and multimodal spatial imaging of intact proteins and unlabeled small molecules in tissue on a mass spectrometer.

2024: AmberGen is continuing its tradition of innovation by launching new innovative products including Miralys Antibody Panels and Miralys Antibody Conjugation Kits.

Read more:

  1. Olejnik, J., Sonar, S., Krzymanska-Olejnik, E., and Rothschild, K. J. (1995) Photocleavable biotin derivatives: a versatile approach for the isolation of biomolecules Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 92, 7590-7594,
  2. Olejnik, J., Krzymanska-Olejnik, E., and Rothschild, K. J. (1998) Photocleavable aminotag phosphoramidites for 5′-termini DNA/RNA labeling Nucleic Acids Res 26, 3572-3576 gkb580 [pii]
  3. Olejnik, J., Ludemann, H. C., Krzymanska-Olejnik, E., Berkenkamp, S., Hillenkamp, F., andRothschild, K. J. (1999) Photocleavable peptide-DNA conjugates: synthesis and applications to DNA analysis using MALDI-MS Nucleic Acids Res 27, 4626-4631 gkc668 [pii]
  4. Pandori, M. W., Hobson, D. A., Olejnik, J., Krzymanska-Olejnik, E., Rothschild, K. J., Palmer, A. A. et al. (2002) Photochemical control of the infectivity of adenoviral vectors using a novel photocleavable biotinylation reagent Chem Biol 9, 567-573 S1074552102001357 [pii]
  5. Zhou, Y., Liu, Z., Rothschild, K. J., and Lim, M. J. (2016) Proteome-wide drug screening using mass spectrometric imaging of bead-arrays Sci Rep 6, 26125 10.1038/srep26125
  6. Yagnik, G., Liu, Z., Rothschild, K. J., and Lim, M. J. (2021) Highly Multiplexed Immunohistochemical MALDI-MS Imaging of Biomarkers in Tissues J Am Soc Mass Spectrom 32, 977-988 10.1021/jasms.0c00473