Ground-truth insights start with 3D data.

Alpenglow’s story began when CEO Nicholas (Nick) Reder, MD, MPH, then a medical resident in the pathology department at the University of Washington, reached out to Dr. Jonathan Liu of the mechanical engineering department with a technical challenge.  While performing the conventional tasks of slicing tumor samples, preparing them for analysis, and observing them under a microscope, Nick thought there had to be a better way.  He asked Dr. Liu whether there was a technology that could rapidly scan tissue samples to examine and analyze these tumors more efficiently and automatically.  This basic challenge led to a collaboration among Nick, Dr. Liu, Dr. Adam Glaser, and Dr. Larry True, resulting in the development of a patented open-top light-sheet microscope technology. NIH Director Francis Collins recognized the team and technology as groundbreaking technology.

The team spun out Lightspeed Microscopy to commercialize this promising technology, which has the potential to accelerate drug development and enhance clinical diagnostics. Since then, the platform has been AI-enabled with computing and analysis to produce a remarkable 3D spatial analysis of tissue samples at high speed.   

In 2022, the company rebranded as Alpenglow Biosciences to reflect this evolution and an expanded research partnership offering. The naming was inspired by the alpenglow effect, an optical phenomenon that appears as brilliant colors on alpine landscapes as the sun shines its first and last light each day. The name is an analogy for how Alpenglow Biosciences sheds new light on drug development and clinical diagnostics, revealing unique insights that can only be delivered by its AI-enabled 3D imaging platform, Aurora 3D™.

Recently, Alpenglow has been awarded up to $24M in contracts from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and has secured additional investment to further clinical product development.

In May 2025, Alpenglow and ZEISS announced a partnership to co-develop an inverted light-sheet microscope and a bioinformatics pipeline tailored for clinical 3D pathology applications.

Later in 2025, Alpenglow expanded its clinical diagnostics strategy through a multi-year agreement with Virdx, combining whole-tissue 3D light-sheet imaging with MRI-based AI for prostate cancer detection. The collaboration is designed to generate high-resolution 3D ground-truth datasets from human prostate tissue, helping bridge radiology and pathology in a single, non-destructive workflow.

In 2026, Alpenglow took another step toward clinical adoption through a strategic partnership with PathNet to advance clinical-grade 3D AI diagnostics in urologic oncology. The partnership combines national pathology workflows and tissue archives with Alpenglow’s volumetric 3D imaging and AI-powered spatial analytics, starting with prostate and bladder cancer.

That same year, Alpenglow introduced Summit AI™, its AI-powered platform for 3D tissue imaging and digital pathology. Built to generate quantitative readouts and spatial profiling from full biopsy data, Summit AI™ reflects the company’s next evolution: turning complex tissue imaging into structured, decision-ready insights for translational research, biomarker development, and clinical discovery.