NEW YORK – BioFluidica and Hamilton Company announced on Wednesday that they have entered a comarketing agreement to bring BioFluidica's liquid biopsy platform and Hamilton's liquid handlers to laboratories worldwide.
BioFluidica's LiquidScan platform integrates into the automated pipetting channels of Hamilton's Microlab Star and Starlet liquid handlers, enabling the latter to isolate extremely rare circulating tumor cells, circulating leukemic cells, fetal cells, cell-free DNA, and exosomes from biological samples.
Hamilton's Starlet is a customizable liquid handling robot with sensitive programmable pneumatic features and walkaway automation, and is designed to avoid processing loss using BioFluidica's proprietary closed-loop pipetting interface and microfluidic biomarker selection chips.
Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.
The agreement represents early commercialization for BioFluidica, which scored several Small Business Innovation Research grants from the US National Institutes of Health in 2019 to conduct clinical studies of its platform and which raised $6 million in a Series B financing round earlier this year.
For its part, Hamilton has entered into other partnerships this year, including with Bionano Genomics and Pacific Biosciences.
"LiquidScan is a novel platform that enhances the ability to perform diagnostic testing applied to many diseases, including several types of cancer, prenatal diagnostics, stroke, and infectious diseases," BioFluidica CEO Rolf Muller said in a statement. "We have worked with Hamilton to ensure seamless automation allowing for high-throughput and lower-cost testing than current surgical biopsy procedures."