Polymer Sensors for Rapid Cell Genotyping

In this proposal Vuronyx Technologies in collaboration with Prof Vince Rotello at UMass Amherst aims to develop a prototype kit for validation of cell lines Cell lines have a wide range of applications in both academic and life sciences industries including genomics drug discovery tissue engineering regenerative medicine and toxicity testing However cell cultures are prone to contamination by foreign cells which may rapidly displace the original cells The identity of cultured cells should be routinely verified but a majority of laboratories do not monitor the identity of their cell lines and many cell lines are misidentified The costs effort and time required to confirm the identity of cell lines has been a barrier to adoption of cell line identification as a routine quality control measure Our preliminary results show that our pattern based approach is capable of distinguishing both cell genotype and phenotype Our research will focus on developing a minimalist polymer only sensor array that can rapidly discriminate between cell types and geno phenotypes The polymer platform presents a scalable and reproducible platform an advantage that will be furthered through close collaboration between Rotello and Vuronyx The objective in Phase is to develop the polymer nanoparticle based cell sensing strategy and test it against a range of cell types This proposal is directly relevant to NIH s mission of fostering creative discoveries for human well being as well as NIGMS s mission of understanding of biological processes and advancing disease diagnosis treatment and prevention In this proposal Vuronyx Technologies in collaboration with Prof Vince Rotello at UMass Amherst aims to develop a prototype kit for validation of cell lines Our preliminary results show that our pattern based approach is capable of distinguishing both cell genotype and phenotype The key challenge with these systems is scalability the cost of producing nanoparticles and proteins would make the above systems uncompetitive on the market Our research will focus on developing a minimalist polymer only sensor array that can rapidly discriminate between cell types and geno phenotypes The polymer platform presents a scalable and reproducible platform an advantage that will be furthered through close collaboration between Rotello and Vuronyx