SBIR Phase II: Imaging Flow Cytometer for High-Throughput High-Content Screening

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will be to develop an imaging flow cytometer to enable high-throughput, precision analysis of biological cells for the drug discovery and biotechnology industries. The goal for this project is to provide order-of-magnitude throughput improvements versus other high content cell analysis technologies, which will ultimately lead to an increase in the efficiency of drug discovery. A high throughput imaging flow cytometer is an ideal solution for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, as well as flow cytometry core facilities, because of the demand for higher throughput cellular analysis. In addition to drug discovery, the imaging capability of this flow cytometer will enable researchers to perform rare cell detection with higher precision than is currently available, and ultimately, in vitro hematology and oncology diagnostics using imaging flow cytometry. Finally, a high throughput flow cytometer with an order of magnitude greater throughput will dramatically reduce the time researchers spend in flow cytometry core facilities, ultimately enabling a general increase in biomedical research productivity.This SBIR Phase II project proposes to improve the efficiency of drug discovery by introducing a higher throughput, high content screening (HCS) instrument. HCS investigates the effects and associated mechanisms of action of therapeutic compounds by measuring multiple parameters from individual cells, typically using imaging. Although HCS has been highly effective in discovery new drugs, it, unfortunately, has significant throughput limitations. Namely, HCS requires data to be collected at the single cell level versus the population level. Typically, low-throughput readout techniques, such as flow cytometry and fluorescence imaging, are used to collect this data. This project aims to alleviate the speed limitations associated with imaging in drug discovery by introducing a high-throughput imaging flow cytometer capable of performing sub-cellular imaging at the speeds of traditional high throughput screening. The project leverages a high-speed fluorescence imaging modality based on frequency domain multiplexing, which was developed and demonstrated in Phase I, to provide market-leading imaging performance. Expanding this technology into a full flow cytometer by the end of Phase II, the goal is to have a 3-laser, 10-color imaging flow cytometer ready for researchers performing HCS as well as the general biomedical research community.