Sphere Fluidics Wins New Investment for Development of Unique, Single Cell Analysis Instrument

CAMBRIDGE, England, June 24, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

Sphere Fluidics Limited has developed unique technology for single cell analysis and characterization, and provides proprietary products and novel services for this rapidly-growing market.  The Company has now just secured $2.3 million in a First Close of a new investment round. The latter will finally complete in early September 2014 with more potential funding already in the pipeline. "This is the first tranche of funding that we will use to develop a brand new single cell analysis instrument called Cyto-Mine™ (see image below). This will be revolutionary for the Biopharmaceutical Discovery and Development market," said Dr. Frank F. Craig (CEO).

     (Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140623/693618-a )

"This new instrument can accelerate and enable the discovery of diverse antibodies from primary B-cells or hybridomas. It can perform millions of novel single cell or cell-cell co-incubation assays per day and dramatically improve biopharmaceutical discovery. Its' novel features enable it to identify and retrieve single cells from vast populations of transformed cells to speed biopharmaceutical development. It also offers up to 100-fold improvements in monoclonality and improved recovery of single cells compared to conventional techniques," said Dr. Marian Rehak (R&D Director).

"The instrument was designed after comprehensive market research with over 30 international biopharmaceutical, organizations. It provides a transformational change for this market, offering unique technical features for single cell analysis and benefits including significantly reduced capital, consumable and operational costs," stated Dr. Rob Marchmont (Commercial Director).  

"Development of the Cyto-Mine™ represents the first step in our strategic change from, not only providing biochip and specialist chemical consumables to the single cell analysis community, but also selling integrated, high value systems. We have successfully grown the consumables business to have almost 200 international customers, but believe there are even more customers in our new target markets," said Dr. Frank F Craig (CEO). "We are already collaborating in development of the Cyto-Mine™ system with one of the world's top biopharmaceutical companies. We have decided to extend this type of collaboration, via a Technology Access Program, to enable other major firms to work with us and help shape the final Cyto-Mine™ product. This is a highly innovative program and we can already see other instrument spin-offs in areas such as: synthetic biology, microbial analysis (e.g. antibiotic-resistance screening and micro-flora profiling) and single cell diagnostics and prognostics."

Press Contact 

Sphere Fluidics Limited. Contact Dr Frank F. Craig on:
E-mail: [email protected]
Cell: +44-(0)7805-659566
Tel: +44(0)1223-804201

SOURCE Sphere Fluidics Limited