Public Funding for Sphere Fluidics Limited

To embed expertise in injection moulding for rapid prototyping of hard plastic microfluidics; expanding in-house manufacturing capabilities to produce plastic biochips, thereby, bringing products to market faster, at lower cost and higher quality than competitors.

Sphere Fluidics Limited is an established Life Sciences company based in Cambridge, UK. We provide tools for biopharmaceutical organisations which include instruments and cartridges based on novel microfluidics. This project addresses the speed and efficiency of a critical quality control test which is required to validate the Cyto-Mine single cell analysis system. The approach is expected to yield a 15X reduction in time, yielding significant cost savings for the business and helping our biopharmaceutical customers to complete their projects faster, bringing new therapeutics to market sooner.

no public description

To develop a commercial instrument (PISCES-2) to allow high-throughput, monodisperse microdroplet generation.

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Genetic engineering (GE) is an established tool for R&D and promises to become a globally used approach to correct and treat important diseases, such as cancer and genetic disease, and also able to tackle and solve important environmental issues. Current approaches are dependent upon manual labour and extensive screening, and are highly inefficient and time-consuming. CRISPR/Cas9 technology, a powerful new form of GE, has now triggered a step-change in the range, precision and efficiency with which genomes can be edited. However, production and screening of gene-edited cell lines remains inefficient. New methods that automate and reduce costs and handling time for the generation and recovery of edited cells would be highly welcome. Our project synergises stem cell biology and cellular genetics expertise (from Horizon Discovery and University of Edinburgh) with novel, single-cell manipulation and microfluidic expertise (from Sphere Fluidics Limited). Both Sphere Fluidics and Horizon Discovery have a track record in bringing valuable products and services to the R&D community. This world-class team will develop and validate a new microfluidic-based device for GE, that enables production of high quality engineered cells in a more rapid, efficient and less costly way. This project will support the development of a new benchtop device that will accelerate medical research and improve production of valuable products such as new therapeutics, foods or fuel sources. It will enable innovation and generate a significant return on investment (>200-fold) and provide major commercial potential for the partners, giving them a global lead in this area and creating new jobs.

Cell therapy promises to become a globally used approach to treat important diseases, such as cancer. Current regimes can involve removing a patient's white blood cells (e.g. T-cells), reprogramming them to fight cancer and then reintroducing them to the patient. Current cellular reprogramming techniques are very inefficient (e.g. as low as 3%) and involve complex, inflexible techniques for production. Our proposed project synergises cellular reprogramming and manufacturing expertise (from Cell Therapy Catapult) with novel, single cell manipulation and microfluidic expertise (from Sphere Fluidics Limited) with cell therapy manufacturing and end user expertise (from Cellular Therapeutics Ltd and GlaxoSmithKline). This world-class team will build, test and demonstrate a new cell therapy production microfluidic device that enables the flexible manufacture of high quality, engineered cells in a more rapid, efficient and less costly manner. This will accelerate discovery and improve production of new, valuable cell therapies - giving UK companies a significant lead in this area and improving the quality of patient healthcare across the world.

Synthetic biology has advanced genetic manipulation by applying engineering principles (Design-Build-Test) to enable new discoveries by modifying safe microbes with custom DNA. The ability to write DNA has accelerated, but synthetic biology is now limited by a lack of high-throughput measurement methods to assess performance of custom-built strains. The proposed project links foundational synthetic biology expertise at Imperial College London with microfluidics and mass spectrometry (MS) expertise at Sphere Fluidics Limited. This synergistic team will build, test and demonstrate a new microfluidics-MS platform that enables in-depth analysis of the performance of hundreds of thousands of engineered microbes per day (conventional techniques use high sample volumes and can only test around 10,000 samples a day). To date, most synthetic biologists have only been able to analyse one gene at a time. Uniquely, our MS approach will enable analysis of multiple genes and components of artificial pathways. This will accelerate the discovery, and improve production of new, valuable medicines and fuel sources, and generate valuable, nascent Tools and Services for commercialisation.

Sphere Fluidics Limited is an SME focusing on the development of novel, single cell analysis technologies. MedImmune, the global biopharmaceuticals arm of AstraZeneca, is a pioneer in biopharmaceutical discovery and development. Both companies have pooled their synergistic, science skills to propose the development of a unique, integrated microfluidic instrument that uses miniaturisation and novel chips to process pools of cells and rapidly isolate single cells for applications in biopharmaceutical research and development.