New brand reflects Sphere Fluidics’ culture and ambitions
For more than a decade, Sphere Fluidics has honed its expertise in scientific and engineering research and development to create novel microfluidic technology platforms – platforms designed specifically for single cell isolation and analysis to enable its customers globally to effectively work small, think big.
Originally spun out from the University of Cambridge, the team specialises in delivering miniaturisation across multiple technical areas, enabling its customers to examine a greater number of cells – and isolate that single valuable one – faster and at a lower cost than ever before.
Whether it be searching for the ideal cell to develop a new cell line, working with antibodies or driving discovery in synthetic biology, Sphere Fluidics’ technology is easing its customers’ journey to discovery in labs globally.
The pharmaceutical industry is in urgent need of high-throughput technologies capable of manipulating large cell numbers to identify new therapeutics, as well as ways to improve bioproduction.
Traditionally, many different items of equipment would have been required to analyse, sort, image, and dispense single ‘hit’ cells – resulting in resource-intensive, time-consuming and expensive workflows and limiting speed-to-clinic for new therapies.
Cyto-Mine®, Sphere Fluidics’ flagship product, is an automated platform which integrates single cell screening, sorting, dispensing, imaging and clone verification.
Underpinned by patented, microfluidic picodroplet technology, the Cyto-Mine® platform provides an integrated system with an easy to use and intuitive interface that can automatically screen up to 40 million cells in a matter of hours, compared with 10,000 cells typically achieved using multi-step manual techniques.
This unrivalled throughput is applicable to a wide variety of research areas, with extensive experience within antibody discovery, cell line development, cell engineering and synthetic biology.
Rather than just simply automating traditional processes, the technology also facilitates rapid, high-throughput single cell manipulation and analysis across an expanding range of emerging research areas, including precision genome editing, cell therapy research and diagnostics.
The system is widely recognised by industry experts and seamlessly adopted, demonstrating significant savings in time and cost, and providing absolute assurance of quality and reliability, to unlock the full potential of biopharmaceutical discovery.
Recently introduced, Sphere Fluidics’ new branding is a natural progression in the company’s development; the change in look and tone better reflects the team’s customer-centric, forward-thinking and innovative ethos.
The update follows a period of significant expansion and programme success within the last twelve months, including a series of new appointments to its senior leadership team: e.g., Richard Hammond as Chief Technical Officer and Kenneth Hitchner as Chairman of its Board of Directors.
Furthermore, to support this rapid growth and investment in new product development, the team recently expanded into new, purpose-built facilities at Granta Park.
The first phase of the move doubled overall space capacity with a view to expand further as later stages of building complete. In this time, Sphere Fluidics was also selected for involvement in the EU-funded research programme, 3DSecret.
Coordinated by the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory, the 3DSecret consortium has been awarded €3.4 million to develop cutting-edge technologies to investigate the stochastic patterns behind metastasis at the single-cell level, to predict cancer evolution.
This new identity signifies Sphere Fluidics’ ongoing commitment to growth and strength in the market; working with scientists to solve throughput challenges and streamline their workflows, while showcasing the possibilities of pioneering single cell discovery and analysis technology.
This collaborative approach is essential to building the future in drug discovery, appreciating that many great things start small.