Surface plasmon resonance is the gold standard for measuring how molecules bind. The data it produces — binding kinetics, affinity constants, real-time interaction curves — underpins drug discovery, biologics development, and fundamental biochemistry across the life sciences. The market for SPR is large and growing. The problem is who can access it.
For decades, the instruments that dominated this space were designed for enterprise. They cost $300,000 or more. They required dedicated specialists, significant bench space, and institutional infrastructure. Good instruments — but built for the top 20% of labs with the budget to match.
The barriers were never scientific. SPR works. The barriers were cost, complexity, and access — the result of engineering and business decisions made a generation ago that locked most researchers out of data they legitimately need.
"We decided not to build a cheaper version of what already existed. We rebuilt the technology from the ground up."
Affinité Instruments grew out of Jean-François Masson's research group at the Université de Montréal, where years of work on SPR optics and plasmonic biosensors produced a fundamentally different approach to how an SPR instrument could be built. That research became the foundation of a company. Founded in 2015 and built entirely on non-dilutive funding, Affinité has taken that technology from a university prototype to instruments running in labs across 15+ countries.
