HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Transformative Biotech, a Boulder, Colorado, company that builds infectious disease tests, is shifting its research and development work to Huntsville after winning a spot in HudsonAlpha’s Primer Lab startup program at the biotechnology institute.
The company, which goes by T-Bio, makes PCR tests, the kind that hunt for small traces of a germ’s genetic material in a patient sample. Most labs must first clean a sample and pull that material out before a test can run. T-Bio holds a patent on a method it calls DirectAmp that skips the extraction step, and the company argues that makes testing quicker and less expensive.
Chief executive Kevin Kraus said joining the incubator lets the firm use molecular and general lab equipment without spending heavily to buy its own. He said the work in Huntsville should produce the data T-Bio needs to land lab partnerships and future sales. Mark Kelleher, who leads research and development as an executive vice president, already lives in Huntsville, and he said the team will use the space to show DirectAmp works across many sample and test types.
HudsonAlpha opened the Primer Lab on Sept. 24 with money from Innovate Alabama. Tenants share upward of 4,000 square feet of benches, equipment and desks on a floor of the Paul Propst Center, a building on the institute’s Huntsville campus.
It grew out of a smaller co-working lab, the Shared Lab, that HudsonAlpha tested in the summer of 2025 and quickly outgrew. Startups in the program get an entrepreneur in residence, legal, administrative and regulatory support, and help applying for non-dilutive grants and meeting investors. HudsonAlpha runs a similar agriculture technology incubator, the Grow Lab, in Dothan.
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