I-Corps: Microfluidic platform for cell characterization and modification

这个i-Corps项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力将使更多的患者更容易负担得起和获得尖端细胞疗法。细胞疗法是治疗癌症和严重免疫缺陷等威胁生命的疾病的最有前途的疗法之一。虽然这些细胞疗法最近已经获得FDA的批准，但它们仍然非常昂贵，单一疗法的成本高达数十万美元。制造细胞疗法需要昂贵的试剂和设备以及高技能的劳动力，这推高了医疗成本，使许多最需要帮助的患者无法获得细胞疗法。这个i-Corps项目旨在用一种创新的低成本细胞处理技术来彻底改变细胞治疗制造领域。这种方法可以有效地将正常细胞改造成有效的细胞疗法，并分离出所需的细胞群以进行质量控制。它受益于低成本运营，并消除了对昂贵的熟练人员的需求。这项技术有很大的潜力开创一个负担得起的细胞治疗和成本效益高的医疗保健的新时代。这个i-Corps项目利用一个微流体平台，可以对细胞进行分类和工程，而对细胞活力和功能几乎没有影响。这种方法不依赖于昂贵而危险的方法，如病毒或电击，而是依靠细胞对快速压缩的自然反应，使处理后的细胞摄取分子，从而将细胞转变为挽救生命的细胞疗法。这种摄取也可用于将标签传递到细胞内部，以指示所需或不所需的细胞特征，以便轻松快速地读出以进行质量控制。整个技术都安装在一个微流控芯片上，每秒可以处理超过10万个细胞。细胞分选技术利用了细胞固有的机械性能，不需要任何额外的化学或生物细胞修饰。这个微流体平台可以执行通常非常复杂的任务，如细胞工程、细胞标记和细胞分选，为制造细胞疗法和将其加工成安全、高质量的治疗提供高效且经济高效的解决方案。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project will make cutting edge cell therapies more affordable and accessible for a larger patient population. Cell therapies are among the most promising treatments for life-threatening diseases, such as cancer and severe immunodeficiency. While these cell therapies have been recently FDA approved, they remain extremely expensive, with single treatment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Manufacturing cell therapies requires expensive reagents and facilities and highly skilled labor, which drives up healthcare costs and makes cell therapies unattainable for many patients in greatest need. This I-Corps project aims to revolutionize the field of cell therapy manufacturing with an innovatively low-cost cell processing technology. This approach can efficiently modify normal cells into potent cell therapies and isolate desired cell populations for quality control. It benefits from low cost operation and eliminates the need in expensive skilled personal. This technology has a great potential to usher in a new era of affordable cell therapies and cost-effective healthcare.This I-Corps project utilizes a microfluidic platform that can sort and engineer cells with little to no impact on cell viability and function. Instead of relying on expensive and dangerous methods such as viruses or electric shock, the approach relies on natural cell response to rapid compressions to cause the processed cells to uptake molecules that can turn cells into life-saving cell therapies. This uptake can also be used to deliver labels to the cell interior to indicate desirable or undesirable cell traits for an easy and rapid readout for quality control. The entire technology is housed on a microfluidic chip that can process over 100,000 cells per second. The technology for cell sorting makes use of inherent cell mechanical properties and does not require any additional chemical or biological cell modification. This microfluidic platform can perform tasks that are normally extremely complicated, such as cell engineering, cell labeling, and cell sorting, providing efficient and cost-effective solutions for both making cell therapies and processing them into safe, high-quality treatments.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.