SBIR Phase I: Sensing Technology for Cell Tracking in Suspension

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop instrumentation that will track significant numbers of individual cells in time and extract the single-cell growth rates of their physiological state. In contrast to microscopy the cells will be kept in suspension. The core innovative concept that will enable the proposed instrument is a two-phase flow phenomenon termed the Segre Silberberg effect. The Segre Silberberg effect states that particulates in a fluid in a capillary will self-organize on the same streamline and therefore have the same velocity independent of the direction of the flow. Thus, by simply pumping in the forward and reverse directions for equivalent amounts of time, the same plug of cells will pass by the measurement point in the same order. Thus repeat measurements of large numbers of single cells can be obtained. The research objectives of this proposal are to examine what are the upper limits of this effect in terms of the number of cells that can be successfully tracked. The broader impact/commercial potential of this technology will be the development of an instrument capable of accurately measuring individual, suspended cells and their development in time in a precisely defined environment. Such instrumentation currently does not exist. It will enable a new research approach to study development and cell cycle progression of microbial cells, differentiation of stem cells, or the response of individual cancer cells to specific drug treatments. Based on the results from a survey at the annual American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) Meeting there was an overwhelming positive response to this cell analysis technology. The survey results strongly suggest that, among researchers in the area of cell biology, there is a high level of interest in and need for an instrument that can track and measure individual, suspended single cells in real time. Given these responses it is conservatively estimated that the total number of laboratories and research institutions across academic, industrial and medical organizations in the US that could benefit from this instrumentation is around 1,000. With the same number in the rest of the world, there are up to 2,000 potential customers in total for this instrumentation representing a potential market size of $600 - $800 Million. This tefchnology has a significant commercial potential and could have a large impact on the scientific community.