Plasticell Receives Accolade at R&D 100 Award Ceremony

For almost 50 years, the prestigious R&D 100 Awards have been recognizing the year’s best new high-technology products.

Determined by a panel of experts chosen by R&D Magazine, the award is recognition that the selected product is one of the most important innovations of the year.

Also known as the "Oscars of Innovation", previous winners include some household names such as the LCD, the ATM, Taxol anti-cancer drug, HDTV, Corning fibre optic, lipid encapsulated drugs etc.

Plasticell's CombiCult™ was chosen as one of the hundred for 2011, which included only three technologies from the U.K.

CombiCult™ was invented to solve the major bottleneck in stem cell research and development, and by extension, the bottleneck to regenerative drug discovery and cell therapy R&D.

In its current iteration, the CombiCult™ workflow allows a single scientist to discover multiple methods of differentiating any stem cell to a mature cell-type of choice in weeks - the status quo takes a whole team of scientists years to discover perhaps a few non-optimal methods.

CombiCult™ does this by effectively performing 10-100,000 experiments in parallel testing millions of combinations of differentiating factors in one go.

The winners were honoured at an award ceremony held on Oct. 13th in Florida. It was preceded by an exhibition of the winners’ products and CombiCult™ was well received by the public, press and other attendees.

Mr. Dennis Saw, CEO of Plasticell attended the event together with Mr. Hugh Cochrane, one of Plasticell's directors and his wife, Mrs. Alexandra Cochrane. The award was received by Mr. Saw and Mrs. Cochrane on behalf of Plasticell.