A preview of the emerging health care companies profiled in the current issue of Start-Up. This month's profile group, "Next-Generation Sequencing" includes profiles of BioNanomatrix, LaserGen, and Microchip Biotechnologies. Plus these Start-Ups Across Health Care: Althera, Impliant, Tenaxis, and VIDA Diagnostics.

Alpha particle therapy is emerging as a potentially powerful weapon in the fight against cancer, but the short range of these heavy particles has limited their investigational use to date to blood cancers. Israel's Althera Medical Ltd. has found a way to deliver them into solid tumors: Its DART technology uses radioactive wires inserted in tumors to trigger a recoil mechanism that sends high-energy alpha particles throughout the mass, breaking cells' DNA and eventually eradicating the tumor.