4.12.22-Health-Science-Startups-CellChorus

DAN MEYER: CellChorus is the dynamic single-cell analysis company. What that means we do is we apply AI to conduct thousands of microscopy experiments in parallel. And we do this to improve the development, the delivery, and the manufacturing of immunotherapies and other novel therapies based on function.

So as we increasingly rely on cell-based therapies, it's important to remember that, number 1, cells have to move and interact to fight disease. In a given population of cells, there are important differences. So it's not sufficient for us to look at a large number of cells in bulk. It's not sufficient for us to look at cells at a single point in time. And it's not sufficient to look at individual cells over time if we're only looking at a small number. We need to be able to evaluate large number of cells over time at single-cell resolution.

Now, typically, our customers are approaching the evaluation of performance of their cells in one of two ways, either with a single-cell modality that's destructive to the cell or with a bulk assay, where they evaluate large numbers of cells over time. Now, we-- this is, on the left, an example of a assay run on citation. You have labeled green antigen-specific T cells and labeled yellow cells expressing spike protein for SARS-CoV-2.

And we talk about this as a one-to-one assay. But this isn't a one-to-one assay. This is a 10,000-to-10,000 assay. And so the readouts we get-- not only are they limited in what we're able to measure, but we're not able to understand which cell performs best and why. We're able to understand what percent of target cells die. We're able to look at cytokine secretion across the population. But we fundamentally don't understand which of our cells are the best performers.

So instead of taking that approach, CellChorus places a small number of cells in thousands of very small wells. Think of it as a very small-scale ice cube tray. In this example, we have the same cells. We have one cell that's labeled green, antigen-specific T cell, and three cells expressing spike protein for COVID. And when I play the video, you'll see that-- well, you would see that that cell needs to move. It needs to form a stable synapse with the target cell, kill that cell, and, if it's going to be a serial-killing T cell, it needs to then move on and do it again.

And CellChorus uses AI to measure the motility, the contact dynamics, killing, subcellular activity and trafficking, morphology, cytokine secretion, et cetera, of every cell or interaction in every well. So what that means for our customers is instead of getting average data across the entire population, they get-- they still get average data across the population with more readouts. They get data on subpopulations-- for example, non-killers, killers, and serial killers-- and then also detailed information on each cell or interaction in the well along with example videos.

Now, if you step back in life sciences, there's been a huge trend towards single-cell analysis. In sequencing, we've-- we now understand cellular heterogeneity because of all the massive advances in single-cell sequencing. We've-- see dynamics as the next wave of single-cell analysis.

Additionally, our-- the cells on our platform are viable at the end of the assays. So we're able to select specific cells of interest for downstream profiling. So for example, that means we can link with transcriptional profiling to engineer more effective serial-killing T cells.

We've opened an early access lab and are working with customers in pre-clinical development, clinical development, and manufacturing. And as one example, a preprint recently posted a few weeks ago from researchers at Kite, Gilead, MD Anderson, and the University of Houston using clinical samples, our timing platform, and then linking that analysis with transcriptional profiling to engineer-- or to identify predictive biomarkers of response.

We're looking to work with cell therapy antibody and vaccine developers, both in our early access lab and as beta customers for our instrument, and then partnerships related to-- for companies that are in the CRO, manufacturing, and distribution space. If you'd like to see more videos from our platform, please go to cellchorus.com/videos. Thank you.

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