FACING MORTALITY Brian Tom’s sculpture “Tadp(old).”
SCIENCE
Neural Delivery BY DYANI SABIN ’14
Sage Aronson ’12 created an affordable mechanism for neuroscientists to study brain activity. While a graduate student in neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, Sage Aronson ’12 was tasked with recording signals along a specific connection between two brain regions. “To learn how information travels along a single strand, from one region to the next, is vital to understanding how the brain processes information,” he says. “But it’s not an easy task. The brain is more like a bowl of spaghetti than an organ with discrete regions.” Moreover, the technology to perform such recordings—known as fiber photometry—was not available commercially and had just recently been described in a journal article. So Aronson got to work. He bought parts, created and fine-tuned prototypes, and within six months had a functioning—albeit hodgepodge— photometry system up and running. Soon, Aronson was hearing from other researchers who had likewise spent money and
DELPHINE LEE
life,” he says. “In a way, these sculptures—a physical reminder of my past thoughts and actions—are my attempt to create permanence to document the ephemeral.” OBERLIN ALUMNI MAGAZINE 2020 / SPRING/SUMMER
time to get photometry spooled up in their own labs: “These were brilliant biologists who did not need to be spending valuable time reinventing the wheel.” So Aronson got to work developing a plug-and-play photometry system that could be widely accessible. He kept the design open source and developed a way to use 3D printing to lower costs and increase the system’s functionality. To produce the system, he and another scientist (and now his wife), Kelsey Ladt Aronson, founded their own company, Neurophotometrics (NPM). Aronson earned his PhD in March 2019 and now works full time as CEO. To date, NPM has installed systems in more than 100 labs in 17-plus countries throughout the world. “We expected to sell two or three of these to supplement my graduate student stipend and be able to go out for sushi more frequently,” he says. “We never expected it to grow so quickly.” The business now has 10 full-time employees and has doubled its facility size every six months. “We’ve worked really, really hard to make sure that labs are collecting data quickly, and that it’s high-quality,” Aronson adds. “It’s been really humbling. The most exciting part for me has been going to conferences and seeing other people present data with our system.”
As this issue of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine was nearing production, Neurophotometrics shifted its purpose to respond immediately to the COVID-19 crisis. “Our company pivoted to design, test, and manufacture nasal pharyngeal swabs to help flatten the curve,” says Aronson. Clinical data results indicate the company’s swabs are outperforming the commercial swab by a large margin, according to Aronson. The company registered with the FDA and has partners to ramp up production to create 1 million swabs per week. For more information, visit neurophotometrics.com. 11