David Colby has spent his career building novel chemicals for pharmaceutical and biotech applications. A trained chemist and pharmacist, Colby was developing new solvents for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries when, in 2022, his lab made an unexpected discovery: a new class of solvents with enormous implications for both fields and, it turned out, for how doctors understand and treat pain. That discovery became Fluoriq, a Mississippi-based startup now working to bring the first real-time, non-invasive pain diagnostic to clinical settings.
The premise is straightforward but significant: today, there is no objective way to measure pain. Doctors ask patients to rate their discomfort on a scale of one to ten. “We have high blood pressure tests, we have cholesterol tests, we have all sorts of diagnostics,” Colby said. “But for something as simple as pain, we have nothing.” Fluoriq’s diagnostic would give clinicians a measurable, validated signal to guide treatment decisions rather than relying on self-reported scores.
For the more than 50 million Americans living with chronic pain, and for physicians trying to manage opioid prescriptions responsibly, that kind of precision matters. More than 60,000 people died from opioid-related causes in 2025. “What we plan to bring to market is a way for doctors to quantitatively get a biomarker for pain,” Colby said, “to help them decide whether to put patients on different painkillers, whether they should come off them and help them better achieve treatment outcomes rather than deal with these terrible side effects.”
Fluoriq has been supported by the MS-FAST Phase 0 award, which helps Mississippi small businesses prepare competitive federal SBIR/STTR research proposals, and Colby placed in the Oxford CoBuilders pitch competition. His team has also worked with the MCity startup founders program in Vicksburg on pitch development and customer discovery. A crowdfunding campaign has brought in more than 16 investors toward a $350,000 target, capital that would carry Fluoriq to a minimum viable product.
The company plans to launch first in Mississippi clinics before expanding across the Southeast. Colby sees a longer runway beyond that first product, but he’s focused on getting this diagnostic into doctors’ hands. The science, he said, is already there. “Our product is past proof of concept and actually giving validated biomarkers for pain.” The next step is making it accessible in hospitals, clinics, and eventually at home.
Watch the full Founder Spotlight interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/GKTn-vqUWBY?si=c4E5BkzIw9ZUNzMw
