Kinetic River Corp., a leader in development of advanced flow cytometry technology, announced the successful completion of a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The competitive $1.5-M grant was awarded to Kinetic River by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), which fosters research focused on development of innovative biomedical platforms.
Flow cytometry is a powerful cell analysis tool with broad utility in research and clinical fields as diverse and important as tumor biology research, cancer and AIDS diagnostics, immunophenotyping, and cancer immunotherapy. Fluorescent markers are used to distinguish different cell types; however, the spectral emission overlap between the various markers causes many problems, from a limit to the maximum number of markers measurable in any given sample to a high burden on operators and high costs of reagents and controls to perform the compensation procedures typically required using purely spectral methods.
The NIH award enabled the continued development of Kinetic River’s “Arno” technology for time-resolved cell analysis. One of the applications made possible by this patented approach is compensation-free flow cytometry: By discriminating fluorescent markers not only by their color but also by the decay of their fluorescence emissions (their “lifetime”), the Arno avoids the issues of spectral spillover that hamper existing flow cytometers.
In addition, Kinetic River demonstrated doubling the number of markers measurable on each detector, while paving the way to tripling them. Lifetime-based discrimination allows emissions from multiple markers to be collected by each detector, greatly expanding the analytical power of flow cytometry while minimizing the number of lasers and detectors needed in a system.
“These results cap more than seven years of research and development,” said Giacomo Vacca, Ph.D., president of Kinetic River. “The fact that we were able to perform a 12-marker assay using only 2 lasers and 6 detectors is unprecedented. Even more exciting than that is the range of different applications these results open up, from compensation-free flow cytometry to a vastly expanded number of fluorescent labels measurable with, in fact, fewer lasers and detectors than on existing analyzers.”