I-Corps: Magnetic Ratcheting Cytometry

细胞疗法，如癌症免疫疗法和干细胞疗法，代表了使用细胞作为“活药物”的医学治疗的新范例。然而，研究机构和公司在细胞治疗领域面临的一个主要瓶颈是细胞分离和纯化。 传统的细胞分离工具，包括磁辅助细胞分离（MACS）和荧光辅助细胞分离（FACS，又名流式细胞术），受到影响细胞分离质量和增加细胞治疗行业成本的几个限制。 具体地，FACS和MACS不能单独地获得高纯度和高产率的细胞分离。 这需要对每个样品进行多轮MACS和FACS分离，从而增加了处理成本并降低了通量。 这个I-Corps团队开发了一种基于磁性的细胞分离技术，可以解决这一差距，提供一种可以提供高纯度和高产率分离的工具。 如果商业化，该系统可以将细胞分离成本降低约10倍，并为研究人员提供新的功能，这将加速细胞治疗的发展。 该团队已经开发并测试了一种原型仪器，使用多种细胞样本，包括临床抽血，并与细胞治疗研究人员开展了几项关键合作。该项目的活动将是使用商业模式画布来测试和验证/反驳有关细胞治疗市场的假设。该团队首先计划生成其目标客户群和价值主张的假设，然后进行客户访谈以验证/反驳这些假设。在八周的时间里，该团队计划采访至少100名潜在客户，以证明/反驳其假设。响应和数据分析将被转录、汇总并上传到Launchpad中央网络应用程序。最终的交付成果将是一个完整的商业模式画布和未来商业化工作的决定。

Cell therapies, such as cancer immunotherapy and stem cell therapy, represent a new paradigm of medical treatment using cells as "living drugs." However, one major bottleneck faced by both research institutions and companies in the cell therapy space is in cell separation and purification. Traditional cell separation tools including magnetic assisted cell separation (MACS) and fluorescence assisted cell separation (FACS aka flow cytometry) suffer from several limitations which affect cell separation quality and increase costs for the cell therapy industry. Specifically, FACS and MACS cannot individually procure both highly pure and high yield cell separations. This requires multiple rounds of MACS and FACS separation to be performed on each sample, thereby increasing processing cost and decreasing throughput. This I-Corps team has developed a magnetic based cell separation technology which can address this gap providing a tool that can provide both high purity and high yield separations. If commercialized, the system can reduce cell separation costs by approximately 10x and extend new capabilities to researchers which will accelerate cell therapy development. The team has already developed and tested a prototype instrument with multiple cell samples, including clinical blood draws, and has developed several key collaborations with cell therapy researchers.The activities of this project will be on customer discovery using the business model canvas to test and validate/disprove hypotheses about the cellular therapy market. The team first plans to generate hypothesis of its target customer segments and value propositions and then perform customer interviews to validate/disprove those hypotheses. In the span of eight weeks the team plans to interview at least 100 potential customers with the goal of proving/disproving its hypotheses. Responses and data analysis will be transcribed, aggregated, and uploaded to the Launchpad central web application. The final deliverable will be a completed business model canvas and a go/no go decision on future commercialization efforts.