Indee Labs Awarded $2M Contract to Scale up and out Hydropore™ for Cell Therapy

Indee Labs announces a $2M contract with the National Cancer Institute to scale up and out the Hydropore™ platform for cell therapy with Eyquem Lab at UCSF.

BERKELEY, Calif., Nov. 2, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Indee Labs is a biotechnology company developing the Hydropore™ for non-viral intracellular delivery. The team at Indee Labs was recently awarded an additional contract from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health to scale up and out the Hydropore™ platform for cell therapy.

"With the help of Justin Eyquem's lab at UCSF, we were successful in completing our first contract with the National Cancer Institute covering knock-ins to T cells with improved in vitro function over electroporation. The team at Indee Labs is excited to continue our work together in scaling up and out Hydropore™ for cell therapy development and manufacturing" stated Ryan Pawell, Chief Executive Officer of Indee Labs.

As part of the Phase II contract, the Hydropore™ platform and protocols will be optimized for single-step, leukapheresis-scale processing of gene-edited CAR-T cells using both adeno-associated virus (AAV) and DNA for knock-ins. Improvements in CAR-T cell function and efficacy will be further verified relative to industry standard electroporation platforms in vivo using established mouse models at UC San Francisco.

The team at Indee Labs has already made multiple advancements in the field of intracellular delivery. Key advantages of the Hydropore™ platform include increased yield and improved function of modified cells relative to multiple industry standard electroporation and nascent delivery platforms. Currently, a single microfluidic Hydropore™ chip can rapidly process tens of millions of cells in seconds using existing, non-toxic GMP-grade buffers without the need for multiple instruments to go from small to medium scale processing. This contract will enable single-step, large-scale processing of CAR-T cells and similar modified immune cells – the gentle nature of Hydropore™ has already been shown to improve the expansion of rare and challenging cell types such as genome edited regulatory T cells and NK cells.

This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. 7591022C00053.

Indee Labs is a biotechnology startup developing Hydropore™ for cell-based immunotherapy research, development and manufacturing. The team at Indee Labs works with 3 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies, various life science and biotechnology companies along with UCSF, Medical University of South Carolina and Stanford. Hydropore™ enables modified immune cell development and manufacturing with improved yield and function using a simple workflow, commercial GMP-grade buffers and a small footprint. Indee Labs is backed by IndieBio/SOSV, Y Combinator, Social Capital, Founders Fund among others including the National Institutes of Health. More information is available at indeelabs.com.       

SOURCE indee labs