I-Corps: Magnetic Ratcheting Cytometry

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

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.