Festival of Biologics EU | October 15-17, 2024 | Basel, Switzerland

Picodroplets for Cell Line Engineering and Antibody Discovery: A Novel Automation Approach 

• How microfluidic-enabled picodroplets deliver integrated, user friendly, automated workflows.   
• Workflows where millions of individual cells can be assessed daily, and the best single cells selected – in an environment that maintains high cell viability and outgrowth.    
• We will introduce Cyto-Mine®, a platform that enables a step-change in speed and scale of working.   

Picodroplets for Biologics Discovery and Cell Line Development: Accelerating the Discovery and Development Process

Although antibody therapeutics dominate drug development, prolonged workflows and increasing costs during their discovery and development hinder their success.

Cyto-Mine® by Sphere Fluidics, utilizes picodroplet technology, microfluidics and imaging, to address these obstacles in Antibody Discovery (AbD) and Cell Line Development (CLD), expediting therapeutic development. Cyto-Mine® offers significant advantages in the number of cells that can be processed, cost per run, and the speed with which projects can be completed. Sphere Fluidics has developed a 2nd generation Cyto-Mine® instrument that enables the use of more fluors, multiplexed assays, and a broader range of applications.

Early applications of the new Cyto-Mine® platform will enable cell isolation based on cell surface markers, viability, and titer of secreted proteins. Moreover, in combination with re-injection-based workflows, it will facilitate complex assays like combining cell types in a single droplet (crucial for binding assessment, cytotoxic assays, and advancing antibody development).

About Dr. Elena Shvets

Dr. Elena Shvets is a Applications Manager at Sphere Fluidics, who develop single cell analysis platforms using picodroplet technology. After finishing her PhD in the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, focusing on autophagy, Elena moved to postdoctoral studies in MRC-LMB, Cambridge, UK, to work on membrane trafficking and endocytosis. As part of her research, she used several genome-editing tools such as TALENs and CRISPR-Cas9 to manipulate mammalian cell genome by deleting or tagging multiple cell membrane proteins.

Since joining Sphere Fluidics 5 years ago, Elena works across multiple areas of R&D, including assay development, antibody discovery, and cell line development. She has also worked as the primary technical lead and project manager in two grants funded by Innovate UK and Eurostars Eureka to apply picodroplet technology in cell engineering and genome editing.

Her particular interest lies in consolidating steps in the cell engineering workflow into an all-in-one automated solution to manipulate, screen, and isolate rare positive clones of edited cells.