Cell & Enzyme Screening

Functional FACS

Cancer & Residual Disease Diagnosis

Antibody Engineering

Drug Formulation

Industrial Enzyme Development

Therapeutic Enzyme Development

On-chip Synthesis & Screening

RNAi Screening

Ethanol Development

 

Cancer & Residual Disease Diagnosis
PLS

RainDance Technologies (RDT) has combined droplet technology with microfluidics to enable a large number of analytical reactions (>105/min) to take place using extremely low volumes of drugs or reagents in microscopic NanoReactors™. The Professional Laboratory System™ (PLS) is an automated, compact fluid handling platform that enables powerful new procedures for optimizing protocols to identify cancer markers present in very low copy numbers on the surface of single cancer cells with high sensitivity and specificity enabling the detection of residual disease. RDT works with strategic partners to accelerate development of this application based on the specific interests of its collaborators.

PLS Benefits

RDT’s ultra-sensitive high throughput technology vastly improves upon traditional biomarker detection techniques and thus makes it highly amenable to cancer and residual disease diagnosis. Due to RDT’s ability to encapsulate individual cells, enzymatic amplification is possible which allows for detection to be achieved with very few targets present. Instead of tagging a marker with a fluorescent entity, markers are bound with an enzyme that cleaves inert molecules into fluorescing compounds. Hence, even cells expressing very few markers will deliver a detectable signal that can be analyzed to estimate the number of markers present per droplet. In addition, the PLS can also perform studies identifying and validating novel therapeutic targets, accelerate the adoption of population-enrichment strategies for clinical trial recruitment, and increase the use of biomarker endpoints as surrogates for clinical benefit in oncology clinical trials.

  • Entirely automated process combines the functionality of multiple devices
  • Droplet encapsulation of microbes allows screening for secreted target enzymes
  • Cells can be lysed within droplets to investigate full array of cellular material
  • Unique carrier oil allows for the encapsulation and growth of viable cells
  • Precise microdroplet sizing increases reagent concentrations to accelerate assay reactions
  • Picoliter size droplets significantly reduce reagent usage
PLS Features
Chips for cancer and residual disease diagnosis are configured using fluid management modules that control the continuous flow of thousands of individual NanoReactors™ per second.
  • Sample Loading -- The loading module precisely formulates the microdroplets with an average of ≤ 1 microbe per droplet
  • On-chip Incubation -- NanoReactors™ are incubated on-chip under controlled conditions for exact intervals that can range from less than a second to hours.
  • Optical Readouts -- A variety of optical detection methods including fluorescence detection, fluorescence polarization, and light scattering can be used to screen and sort the NanoReactors™

Cancer & Residual Disease Schematic

Chip architecture for cancer and residual disease diagnosis