SBIR Fast Track: Development of a High-throughput Magnetic Cytometer for Single Cell Sorting

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Project Summary This Small Business Innovation Research project aims to develop a high-throughput easy-to-use cell sorter MagiCyte™ to rapidly and precisely sort intact and viable rare cells at single-cell resolution. Single-cell sorting from a heterogeneous cell population has been essential to life science applications such as monoclonal antibody production and cell line development. Recently, with the rapid growth of precision medicine, there has also been a strong demand for single-cell sorting technologies for rare cells, such as circulating tumor cells (CTCs), circulating fetal cells, stem cells and antigen-specific T- or B-cells. However, collecting such rare cells at single-cell resolution to meet the requirements of single-cell analysis is not feasible for conventional single-cell sorting techniques. Micromanipulation and serial dilution are time consuming and low-throughput, while fluorescent-activated cell sorting (FACS) suffers from remarkable cell loss and is inefficient in isolating rare cells. In addition, many such techniques require cell fixation and/or fluorescent staining, which decreases cell viability and thus prohibits many downstream molecular analyses, as well as and cell culture. As such, there is an unaddressed need for high throughput single-cell sorting of rare cells. We aim to develop a high-throughput chip-based cytometer MagiCyte™ to rapidly isolate, identify and sort single intact and viable target cells from heterogeneous cell population. The core component of MagiCyte is a semiconductor chip MagiChip™ which is used for single cell identification and single cell sorting. In this fast- track project, we will first develop the control software and demonstrate automated single-cell sorting; In Phase II, we will develop the next-generation MagiChip, build the MagiCyte beta product and validate the system on clinical samples with our collaborators.