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Nuclera

A life science tools company headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with operations in Boston, Massachusetts. The business sells and supports benchtop systems used by research organizations to accelerate access to functional proteins for drug discovery and protein engineering workflows.

Founding and History

Nuclera was founded to address bottlenecks in protein expression and purification that slow early discovery work. The company has funded commercialization through venture financing, including a $75 million Series C in October 2024 and a further $12 million extension announced in January 2026, taking the Series C total to $87 million. In January 2026, Nuclera also reported its first sales in Asia through placements at universities in Taiwan.

Therapy Areas and Focus

Nuclera is platform-led rather than indication-led. Its systems are used across therapeutic areas wherever rapid access to soluble or membrane proteins is rate-limiting, including antibody discovery, enzyme programs, and membrane-target drug discovery.

Technology Platforms and Modalities

Nuclera’s core product is the eProtein Discovery System, an automated protein prototyping platform that combines:

cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS)
digital microfluidics cartridges for parallelized screening
automated purification and in situ detection steps
software-guided optimization (including construct and condition screening)

The system is positioned to take users from DNA templates to purified, assay-ready proteins on short timelines, with workflows for both soluble proteins and membrane proteins (added as a dedicated workflow in 2025).

Key Personnel

Michael Chen is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder.

Strategic Partnerships

Nuclera positions its system as compatible with complementary upstream and downstream tools used in discovery labs (for example, membrane mimetics and protein stabilization approaches) and works with external groups through application collaborations and user-site deployments as it expands globally.

FAQ Section

Nuclera provides an automated, benchtop platform for rapid protein expression and purification optimization using cell-free protein synthesis and digital microfluidics to run many expression conditions and construct variants in parallel.

The primary users are biopharma and biotech discovery groups, protein engineering teams, structural biology labs, and academic centers that need faster access to functional proteins for screening, assay development, and characterization.

It automates screening of constructs and expression conditions, prioritizes soluble/high-yield hits, and produces purified, assay-ready protein. The workflow is intended to reduce iterative “trial-and-error” expression cycles that typically happen across multiple instruments and manual steps.

The platform is designed to support both soluble proteins and more challenging targets such as membrane proteins, which are often difficult to express and stabilize but are central to many drug discovery programs.

In January 2026, Nuclera announced a $12 million extension to its Series C financing, bringing the round total to $87 million, and reported its first sales in Asia via deployments at universities in Taiwan.

Nuclera’s differentiation is the combination of cell-free expression with automated, parallel microfluidic screening and purification in a benchtop format, aiming to shorten the time from DNA to functional protein and standardize protein prototyping across labs.

Execution milestones are commercial rather than regulatory: expansion of installed base across geographies, continued workflow additions (including protein classes and application-specific modules such as antibody engineering), and scaling of manufacturing and support to meet demand.

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