"Partillion Bioscience is an early-stage life science company commercializing an award-winning innovation from UCLA that enables the democratization of advanced single-cell assays. Our nanovial products provide the revolutionary capability to rapidly isolate millions of individual cells into nanoliter compartments to perform sophisticated assays that can drive biological discovery at the single-cell level. Our unique reagent platform is compatible with existing instruments in customer’s labs, enabling rapid penetration of multi-billion dollar markets in the single-cell space. The foundational intellectual property was developed over five years of research at UCLA by Partillion’s co-founders and microfluidics experts Dr. Joseph de Rutte and Dr. Dino Di Carlo and received the prestigious Innovation Award from the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) in early 2020.
Partillion’s unique single-cell reagent platform leverages cavity-containing hydrogel particles or “nanovials”, that hold single cells in sub-nanoliter volumes of fluid, 100,000 times less volume than a single well of a 1536-well microwell plate. Fluids are easily exchanged in the suspendable nanovial containers by centrifugation and pipetting, and each compartment can be sealed and unsealed using biocompatible oils to prevent cross-talk between samples. The nanovial surfaces are easily modified to facilitate attachment of different cell types or capture biomolecules to support high-throughput single-cell functional assays. For example, antibody-coated nanovials are used to capture secreted molecules from individual cells and secretions can then be stained with fluorescently tagged antibodies or antigens to quantify secretion quantity and antigen-specificity. Assay operations with nanovials are highly parallel enabling users to scale assays as needed from tens of thousands to millions of compartments. Importantly, nanovials are engineered to be compatible with existing flow cytometers enabling seamless integration with existing workflows and the capability to screen at high-throughput.
The flexible nature of the nanovial platform enables rapid development of new assay formats that address our customer’s specific needs. For example, different affinity agents against cell surface markers can be utilized to isolate and retain specific subsets of suspension cells. Extracellular matrix materials such as gelatin or cell binding motifs such as RGD can be integrated into the nanovial matrix to facilitate binding and growth of adherent cells including producer cells (CHO, HEK), fibroblasts, and mesenchymal stem cells. We have demonstrated a number of single-cell secretion workflows with our nanovial product, including high throughput screening of producer cells based on relative IgG production as well as screening of B lymphocytes and hybridomas based on antigen-specific antibody production using commercial fluorescent activated cell sorters. We have also demonstrated the ability to isolate and screen primary T cells based on expression of multiple cytokines as well as surface presented proteins. Sorted cells remain intact and viable, enabling regrowth for downstream analysis. Single-cell RT-PCR enables RNA recovery and amplification from single cells on nanovials allowing for the recovery of antibody sequences. Nanovial-enabled workflows promise to democratize antibody discovery and cell line development, and also empower researchers to investigate single-cell secretions, as a key cellular function, with unprecedented precision and scale."
