Technology Overview

Plasticell's technology breaks through the current bottleneck in stem cell research - the problem of directing the differentiation of pluripotent cells - and enables two innovative approaches to regenerative drug discovery.

In contrast to basic cell culture in which cells are cultured in a medium of fixed composition, laboratory experiments aimed at differentiation of stem cells require cell culture in a temporally defined series of variable media. When stem cells are cultured in the correct series of media, applied at the right time, they recapitulate the sequence of events observed in normal development.

In all tissue culture, the optimal protocol can only be discovered by a process of 'trial and error', but in differentiation experiments in particular the effect of testing different combinations of conditions means that the number of 'trial and error' experiments which must be performed increases exponentially with respect to the number of conditions which are tested. It is therefore practically impossible to carry out systematic assays of large numbers of differentiation conditions in stem cell research using conventional cell culture methods.

However, Plasticell has developed a novel method which makes this possible. Combinatorial Cell Culture™ allows millions of combinations of cell culture experiments to be multiplexed, and thus dramatically improves the throughput of stem cell research.

Plasticell has developed two additional technologies, which are used internally in drug discovery. CombiScreen™ is a cellular phenotype-based small molecule screen; and CombiTarg™ is a functional genomics-based drug discovery platform.

Plasticell's technologies can be applied to the study of stem cells, cancer cells and normal cells; and to the discovery of natural or synthetic small molecule drugs that affect these cells. For a primer on the properties of these cells - also the similarities and differences between them - click here.