SRC Partners with Sphere Fluidics

Sphere’s impressive array of patented products – biochips and specialist chemicals –currently assist hundreds of customers globally with their research. Sphere has a range of novel single cell encapsulation instruments and consumables that perform high-throughput singe cell (and molecule) analysis. 

Cyto-Mine®

Sphere’s main platform, Cyto-Mine®, is the next generation single cell analysis system for antibody discovery and cell line development. Current processes for finding novel antibody targets or developing stable cell lines are time consuming and inefficient. Cyto-Mine® allows you to accelerate, automate and simplify your antibody discovery and cell line development workflows.

Within several hours, it can automatically screen tens of millions of single cells in miniaturised aqueous picoliter compartments called picodroplets. The picodroplets are assayed for single cells that secrete valuable proteins (e.g. antibodies) and imaged (for monoclonality assurance) during subsequent dispensing of “hits”. Cyto-Mine® is enabling, increases throughput and reduces costs and time for biopharmaceutical discovery and development. 

Picodroplet Single Cell Assay and Isolation System 

Sphere Fluidics research instruments are designed to assist you in finding highly valuable and rare biological variants among vast cell populations. By increasing speed and reducing cost, their picodroplet technology can help you save resources while boosting your chances of success.

Sphere Fluidics currently has two research instruments that enable you to generate, sort, and retrieve picodroplets for a range of applications. These are the Picodroplet Single Cell Encapsulation System and the Picodroplet Single Cell Assay and Isolation System. Both are compatible with their range of microfluidic specialist chemicals and biochips, as well as other standard and custom biochips from other sources.

ESI-Mine™

ESI-Mine™ is a label-free platform for high-throughput, miniaturised electrospray injection mass spectrometry (ESI-MS). It can test up to 200,000 biomolecular samples (e.g. peptides, enzymes, antibodies, metabolites and small molecules) per day in miniaturized volumes of 500-700pL (picodroplets) facilitating more efficient screening and analysis in bioproduction or synthetic biology processes.

Applying this novel approach, researchers can create a large library of picodroplets containing microorganisms producing proteins or small molecules of interest for analysis. One major drawback of using MS in analysis is that samples are usually destroyed and cannot be retrieved. To overcome this total sample destruction by ESI-MS, Sphere has developed a unique microfluidics workflow where picodroplets are split into two replicate streams with identical clones, one stream is analyzed by ESI‐MS, and the second stream is subsequently ‘held’ and only those ‘hit’ daughter picodroplets sorted based on the result of the MS analysis.

Cyto-Cellect™ Human IgGκ Detection Kit

Sphere Fluidics’ Cyto-Cellect™ Human IgGκ Detection Kit, in combination with the Cyto-Mine® Single Cell Analysis System, offers a sensitive and robust assay ideal for streamlining cell isolation and titer determination. When picodroplets are formed during the Cyto-Mine® workflow, the Human IgGκ Detection probes are co-encapsulated with the cells to enable the detection of secreted IgG. The Cyto-Cellect™ Human IgGκ Detection Kit is a simple FRET assay that detects the presence of IgG with kappa light chain within picodroplets immediately after secretion from encapsulated cells. 

Sphere Fluidics customers

Sphere has an impressive list of customers in North America and around the globe who use their products and have published data at conferences or in scientific papers on their instruments. These include Janssen (US), GSK (UK and Spain), Merck (Germany), UCB (Belgium), Manchester University (UK) and Texas A&M (US).

Click here to contact SRC to learn more about Sphere Fluidics and their products.