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Cutting Biotherapeutic Development Timelines With Advanced Microfluidics

A lab scientist holding a glass vial containing a liquid with a DNA strand
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The biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries are increasingly focused on enhancing the efficiency of research and development, particularly in areas like antibody discovery and biotherapeutics. One of the key trends driving innovation in these fields is the adoption of automated and high-throughput technologies that streamline complex workflows. Microfluidics and droplet-based technologies are at the forefront of this transformation, offering precision and scalability to accelerate processes, reduce timelines and improve overall productivity.

 

At ELRIG Drug Discovery 2024, Technology Networks spoke with Dr. Graeme Daniels, VP of Commercial EMEA at Sphere Fluidics, to learn more about their latest innovation, the Cyto-Mine® Chroma. In this interview, Daniels shares how this technology is set to revolutionize workflows for biotherapeutic companies and discusses the system’s future potential in broader applications, including cell and gene therapy.

Blake Forman (BF):

Can you give us a top-level overview of the new Cyto-Mine® Chroma and what is unique about it?


Graeme Daniels, PhD (GD):

The Cyto-Mine® Chroma builds on the existing Cyto-Mine® platform, which has been successfully used by customers for several years and is a proven platform for both antibody discovery and cell line development The Cyto-Mine® Chroma adds additional flexibility and multiplexing capability to the platform. The current Cyto-Mine® was built as a two-color system because it was designed for detecting cells producing a single molecule of interest, in most cases an antibody. By adding further lasers and additional PMTs, our users will have a broader choice of fluorophores they can detect, giving more choice in assay design and more sophisticated gating options, allowing them to ask more complex questions of the biology. 

The Cyto-Mine® Chroma instrument against a white background

The Cyto-Mine® Chroma from Sphere Fluidics. Credit: Sphere Fluidics



BF:
Could you expand on how the system will impact the efficiency of clone selection workflows? 

GD:
For many companies, clone selection is very sequential. They'll ask one question, then another and another. All of that adds time to the process. The ability to ask questions simultaneously reduces the overall timeline. The Cyto-Mine® platform has already been shown to reduce clone selection times from months to weeks, in a lot of cases, and now that we can multiplex those questions together, this shortens the process even further.


BF:
What applications or industries do you see benefiting most from this technology?

GD:
In the short term, it will be the biotherapeutics industry, including the antibody discovery and cell line development customers that we're already serving with the Cyto-Mine®. With the Cyto-Mine® Chroma, we can now provide that extra level of functionality. It also provides a good platform for the development of new applications and technologies, which will broaden the application of the system. We're certainly looking at things like cell therapy as it is very amenable to being studied using the picodroplet-based microfluidic technology that the Cyto-Mine® is based on, and with the upcoming release of the Cyto-Mine® Chroma we will have a platform that gives us options to develop even more elegant and sophisticated assays.


BF:
Are there any specific challenges in single-cell screening workflows the Cyto-Mine® Chroma is designed to overcome?

GD:

In the antibody discovery space, shortening the development timeline is very important. The entire process requires lots of questions to be answered. Not just: is this cell making the antibody, but is this cell going to make a good manufacturing platform? Can we scale it up? Is it going to be stable? Is it going to remain viable?

 

All these questions need to be answered during the development phase before the process moves on to large bioreactors. And they take time, so now that developers can potentially start asking those questions right at the very beginning, they can know in advance which cells are more likely to make it through the development process. 



BF:
With the new assays and upgrades planned to the technology, how do you envision the scope of the Cyto-Mine® Chroma developing in the next couple of years?

GD:

The new assays coming in the short term are going to add additional functionality to the customers who are using the platform for antibody discovery and cell line development. In the future, we are thinking about adding new microfluidic processing power to the system to be able to combine different types of cells within a single droplet. These additions will open up the platform to cell therapy applications.

 

Once we go beyond looking at proteins, we can start thinking about viruses, etc., which then opens up the possibility of using the system for things like gene therapy. Droplet microfluidics is a very powerful, almost generic technology that you can apply to almost anything. We've chosen to apply it within the space of biotherapeutics and we've been very successful in doing that, but moving forward, the horizon is limitless, it's just a question of which application area our customers will want to focus on next. There's a strong indication that this will be cell therapy.