NEW YORK – Bico company Scienion and its subsidiary Cellenion said on Thursday that they have exclusively licensed the Nanodroplet Processing in One pot for Trace Samples (NanoPOTS) platform from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and will further develop it for commercial use.
NanoPOTS is a microfluidic sample preparation platform specially designed for conducting mass spectrometry-based proteomic analysis on 10 to 100 cells, down from the thousands usually required.
Coupled to Cellenion's CellenOne single-cell isolation and ultra-small volume dispensing platform, NanoPOTS enables scientists to conduct in-depth single-cell proteomics analyses.
The companies also entered into a research and development collaboration agreement with the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a US Department of Energy facility located at PNNL.
"The analytic power provided by NanoPOTS could help identify new sources of clean energy, unlock secrets to keeping agriculture healthy during droughts, and pinpoint disease markers for diabetes and cancer," Jennifer Lee, PNNL’s market commercialization manager, said in a statement. "As a national laboratory, one of our core missions is to transfer the intellectual property developed through federal funding to private industry where they can make a positive societal impact. We look forward to NanoPOTS being accessible to the broader scientific community."
PNNL scientists first developed NanoPOTS to address challenges in sample processing for mass spectrometry-based small sample analysis.
"We are very excited to finally make NanoPOTS a commercially available product," said Anjali Seth, single-cell proteomics project leader at Cellenion. “This agreement is another key milestone for single cell sample preparation and analysis to the next level.”
Earlier this month, Cellink changed its name to Bico (Bio Convergence) after acquiring Scienion a year ago for €80 million ($94.1 million). Scienion still maintains a subsidiary called Cellenion that operates from Lyon, France.