Plasticell and Sphere Fluidics Sign Research Collaboration

Plasticell has announced the signing of a collaboration agreement with Sphere Fluidics. Plasticell has used its proprietary Combinatorial Cell Culture™ (CombiCult®) platform to develop inexpensive, high-efficiency gene transduction protocols as alternatives to costly commercial transfection reagents currently used in gene therapy trials.

Sphere Fluidics has developed high throughput single cell manipulation and screening technology in picoliter volumes. The two partners aim to combine their technologies to develop quantitatively accurate gene transduction systems with improved efficiency, safety and cost savings.

Plasticell’s CombiCult® technology has long been established as the industry-leading screening technology for stem cell differentiation, but has also found numerous applications throughout the biopharma value chain. Examples in which Plasticell is collaborating with partners to improve manufacturing of therapeutic products include in cell bioprocessing, cancer immunotherapy and gene therapy.

“A leading gene therapy approach involves the insertion of therapeutic genes into the genome of cells outside the body, followed by the administration of these cells into the patients to deliver the therapeutic gene product,“ said Dr Aaron Chuang, Plasticell’s CSO. “The efficiency, safety and cost of this process need to be optimized to ensure therapeutic efficacy, to mitigate potential adverse events such as insertional mutagenesis and to improve the cost-effectiveness of gene therapies.”

“Sphere Fluidics’ technology can potentially improve the current way of cell transduction and
transfection. Our well controlled high-throughput approach can address some of the bottlenecks and risks of the cell manufacturing workflows. We are very keen to collaborate with Plasticell to investigate those issues, to optimize gene insertion processes and ultimately to improve the cell therapy efficacy,” added Dr Marian Rehak, Sphere Fluidics’ Director of R&D.