High throughput toxicity assay on coordinately ordered single cells with individual identity

INV-18104

Background

Cytotoxicity plays an important role in understanding biological mechanisms, detecting diseases, and screening therapeutics. Cytotoxicity measurement is usually carried out by incubating cells in different sized wells with a specific treatment, which yields results based on the average response of cells in the same well. However, cell populations are heterogeneous, and differentiating responses of individual cells within large populations has become crucial, which reflect the importance of studying cellular behavior at a single cell level.

The most commonly used techniques for single cell studies are flow cytometry, capillary electrophoresis, microscopy, and patterned cell arrays.

Technology Overview

A major drawback of a current single-cell assay is that the response of the same cells in multiple processes cannot be tracked. This technology provides a new concept for single cell assay, in which the identity of each individual cell in an ordered array is determined from the assigned coordinators, and can be read‑out at high throughput with a microscope.

This new method can test responses of millions of identical cells in multiple chemical and physical processes with superior statistical power to allow deep data mining.

Benefits

- A high throughput method for rapid analysis of identical cell cytotoxicity

- Easy and efficiently tracking identical cells after multiple different treatments

- Over millions of cells can be tracked simultaneously

Applications

- Drug screening and therapeutics validation

- Drug testing

- Toxicity evaluation

- Environmental and radiation monitoring

- Cell biology and cancer biology research

Opportunity

- License