CellChorus Awarded $2.2 million SBIR Fast-Track Grant by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences

Up to $2.2 million in funding from NIH will be used to scale the company’s TIMING platform for use in any laboratory or facility to improve development and delivery of novel therapies

PRESS RELEASE

HOUSTON, Texas — June 21, 2023. CellChorus®, the dynamic single-cell analysis company™, announced that the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded CellChorus a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Fast-Track grant to advance the development of its Time-lapse Imaging Microscopy In Nanowell Grids™ (TIMING™) platform for dynamic single-cell analysis. The two-year $1.9 million Phase II grant will begin after predetermined milestones are achieved under a $324,000 Phase I grant that is underway.

Immune cell-based therapies are revolutionizing patient care by engineering or recruiting cells to fight disease. Understanding the therapeutic potential of these therapies is complex due to the variation in how cells interact and perform, as well as the need to monitor immune cell function over time. To advance the next generation of cell‑based products, the field requires the ability to profile individual cell‑cell interactions and performance at scale.

The TIMING platform comprehensively studies cells to quantify how immune cells move, interact, kill, survive, and secrete biomolecules at single-cell resolution. Data and insights from the TIMING platform enable the field to develop, manufacture and deliver novel therapies faster, at less expense, and with higher rates of success to benefit patients in oncology, infectious diseases, and a wide range of other diseases and disorders.

“This funding will support development of a product offering that builds on the success of our early access laboratory,” said Laurence Cooper, MD, PhD, co-founder of CellChorus. “As the next frontier of cellular analysis, dynamic single-cell analysis will increase the impact that immunotherapies have in improving the lives of patients.”

The CellChorus TIMING platform is available through a commercial service offering in the CellChorus Innovation Lab. Data from TIMING assays have been featured in more than 20 peer-reviewed papers across a range of cell types and therapeutic areas. Industry leaders have leveraged TIMING data in many different applications, including research, preclinical development, clinical development, manufacturing, and the identification of biomarkers predictive of patient response. In addition to providing data on cellular movement, morphology, interactions, killing, survival and subcellular activity over time, the TIMING platform can provide data on individual cell phenotype and biomolecule secretions. Individual cells of interest can be retrieved for linked downstream analysis such as transcriptional profiling.

This grant is supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R44GM149106. The content of this press release is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

About CellChorus

CellChorus® is the leader in applying artificial intelligence to quantify the function and performance of cells over time to improve the development and delivery of novel therapies that improve patient care. The company applies Time-lapse Imaging Microscopy In Nanowell Grids™ (TIMING™) with neural network-based detection to identify how cells move, activate, kill, and survive at single-cell resolution. The patent-protected platform can link TIMING data and insights with information from other analysis modalities such as single-cell RNA sequencing to provide a comprehensive understanding of cellular function, state and phenotype. Please visit cellchorus.com for more information.

Source: CellChorus Inc.

Company Contact:
Daniel Meyer
CellChorus Inc.
TIMING@cellchorus.com