JPK Instruments Brand Guidelines: Three Berlin Students, Bio-AFM & a 2018 Bruker Deal

Three students, their own money and a Berlin start.

JPK Instruments began in Berlin in October 1999. optics.org, the photonics news site, reported in July 2018 that the company was founded by three students at Humboldt University — Torsten Jähnke, Frank Pelzer and Jörn Kamps — using their own money, and that its name is simply their three initials: J, P and K. The same report says the young firm’s first focus was atomic force microscopy, usually shortened to AFM.

A case study published in September 2014 by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology’s institute for entrepreneurship, technology management and innovation fills in the start. It says the three co-founders launched JPK while they were still students working on their diploma theses, and that their business idea centred on nanotechnology and on tools for working at the molecular level: analysing, handling, manipulating, measuring and visualising. The institute files JPK under what it calls a “competence spin-out”, a company built on special skills that at least one founder had gained at a scientific or research institution.

The KIT study also sets out where the company aimed its instruments. It describes JPK as a maker of nanoanalytical instruments based on atomic force microscopy and, more broadly, scanning probe microscopy, sold mainly for academic and industrial research in the life sciences, biosciences and soft matter — work that can include living cells. JPK’s own label for that focus, the study notes, was BioSPM. With product lines based on atomic force microscopy and force-sensing optical tweezers, the study says, JPK offered solutions for super-resolution imaging and for analysing the nanoscale forces between atoms and molecules.

From Berlin the company spread out. By 2018, optics.org reported, it had opened offices in the UK, Japan, China and the United States. Bruker’s 2018 announcement names the company as JPK Instruments AG, a German stock corporation.

Bio-AFM and optical tweezers.

JPK’s products sat where physics instruments meet the biology lab. Bruker’s announcement of July 2018 describes JPK as supplying microscopy instrumentation for biomolecular and cellular imaging, and for force measurements on single molecules, cells and tissues. It groups the range into two families, BioAFM and optical tweezers, spanning techniques from imaging biological samples to characterising the forces between biomolecules and cells.

The flagship was the NanoWizard line of atomic force microscopes. In the 2018 release, the NanoWizard 4 BioScience AFM is described as combining atomic force imaging with optical fluorescence imaging and super-resolution microscopy. Two more instruments took the force idea in different directions: the ForceRobot, which Bruker says enables single-molecule force spectroscopy for studying receptor–ligand interactions or small molecule–protein binding, and CellHesion, which brings quantitative force measurement to live cells and tissues so that researchers can look at how cells stick to surfaces and to each other.

The second family began in 2008, when, optics.org reports, JPK launched NanoTracker, a force-sensing optical tweezers platform. NanoTracker 2 followed in 2013, and in 2016 JPK introduced what it described as the world’s first combination of optical tweezers and AFM. optics.org quoted JPK’s website on the point of the pairing: joining the positioning, detection and manipulation of optical trapping with the imaging and surface characterisation of AFM opened up work on cellular response, cell–cell and cell–matrix interactions, immune response, infection and the uptake of bacteria, viruses or nanoparticles.

Bruker’s release sums up what JPK brought with it as expertise in live-cell imaging, cellular mechanics, adhesion, molecular force measurements, optical trapping and biological stimulus–response characterisation.

How microscope makers present themselves.

Microscopy makers sell instruments that most people never see, so their visual language is built from the lab itself. The typical product photograph shows a tall grey or white electron column rising from a chamber, set on a desk beside one or two monitors, often in a clean, evenly lit room with no clutter. The instrument is rarely shown working; instead, the screen beside it carries the result, and that result does much of the branding work.

Those results are the field’s most distinctive images. A scanning electron microscope produces greyscale pictures, and makers and their customers often add false colour afterwards to separate grains, cells or layers. Atomic-force and other scanning-probe instruments render a surface as a height map, frequently shown as a coloured relief or a three-dimensional landscape of nanoscale bumps and pits. Cathodoluminescence and Raman maps add another layer, turning light emitted or scattered by a sample into colour-coded images. Many makers credit these images to the university or institute that made them, which lets the customer’s science stand in for the company’s claims.

People appear mostly as scientists at workstations: a researcher seated at a monitor, a hand loading a sample holder, a small team gathered around a screen. Product names tend to be short and are often set in capitals, while technical sans-serif type and restrained blues, greys and blacks dominate websites and brochures.

Much of the presentation happens in person. Trade-show booths at meetings such as Microscopy & Microanalysis, the European Microscopy Congress (EMC) and the International Microscopy Congress are where new instruments are launched, demonstrated and photographed, and where application notes, webinars and customer publications carry the story the rest of the year.

From Berlin spin-out to a Bruker product line.

JPK’s independence ended in July 2018. On 12 July, Bruker Corporation, of Billerica, Massachusetts, announced that it had acquired JPK Instruments AG of Berlin; financial details were not disclosed. Bruker said that over the previous five years it had built a life science microscopy business specialising in neuroscience, live-cell imaging and molecular imaging, and that JPK’s technologies and applications would add to it. JPK was to move into the Bruker NANO group.

Both sides spoke in the release. Mark R. Munch, president of the Bruker NANO Group, said JPK’s products and applications capabilities complemented Bruker’s fluorescence microscopy techniques, which the release lists as multiphoton, swept-field confocal, super-resolution and single-plane illumination microscopy. Anthony Finbow, JPK’s chairman, said the combination would enable further advances in life science imaging, and Torsten Jähnke, the co-founder who had become chief technology officer, said the business JPK had built aligned well with Bruker’s new strategic direction in life science microscopy. optics.org placed the deal alongside other recent Bruker purchases in optical microscopy.

JPK Instruments no longer trades as an independent company. Its range now sits inside Bruker under the BioAFM heading, and the old jpk.com address forwards to Bruker’s BioAFM pages. The parent’s own story is told in our Bruker guide.

For a design guide, JPK Instruments shows how a set of founders’ initials can carry a technical brand from a student start-up in 1999 to a place inside a larger instrument group nineteen years later, with product names such as NanoWizard, ForceRobot and NanoTracker. Compare Bruker, which absorbed it, and Nanosurf, another European atomic force microscopy maker. For this guide we use cell teal, ink and lab grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep JPK Instruments’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.