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I'm Barbara and I'm here to show you a little bit about Samplix and what Samplix can do for the full cell and gene therapy development process.
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So first of all, a little bit about Samplix.
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So we're a team of multidisciplinary industry experts.
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We're about 35 people based in Copenhagen and both my colleague Roman and I are here.
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We have a booth here in the foyer and you're welcome to come and talk to us.
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So we are all here to solve a problem.
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How do we make therapies that do more?
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So at Samplix we believe that the answer to that is to start high throughput screening or large scale throughput screening.
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From early research, we have an instrument called the Xdrop that is a droplet microfluidics instrument.
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I think a lot of you have heard about droplet microfluidics systems out there and we're capable of producing these droplets and encapsulating biological material from quite early and you are able to analyse your samples from quite early research and take these products all the way to late development.
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Our mission is to accelerate research towards cures.
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So with X Drop we enable functional screening as I said, for millions of variants a day from early research that can be taken all the way to manufacturing.
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We want to enable biological advances across various focus areas so we can aid target validation, process development, and product characterization all the way to manufacturing.
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We have assays that can aid gene therapy, immunology, detecting cytokine release for example, and cancer therapies, cell killing assays or Granzyme B assays.
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I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the X drop and X drop family and give you some examples of applications where we have utilised our instrument to aid the process.
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So the Xdrop empowers gene and cell therapy, 1 droplet at a time.
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So we are a droplet company and we are a tool manufacturer.
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So we produce these instruments here.
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So we have the Xdrop and the Xdrop sort.
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The Xdrop is a droplet generator, so you can encapsulate single cells in these droplets and analyse them in a single cell format.
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The Xdrop Sort can both encapsulate single cells and sort them out based on a fluorescent outcome.
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We also produce the cartridges.
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We have Droplet generation cartridges and sorting cartridges and we provide all the reagents that go with that as well.
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One thing that's very important about the type of droplets that we make is that they are double emulsions.
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So these droplets are double encapsulated.
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So the core is an aqueous phase and the outer phase is also aqueous.
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So it's suspended in an aqueous buffer.
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Which means that these droplets are compatible with common flow cytometers and faxes.
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So you could use your fax facilities you already have for screening of these droplets for screening of the single cells in these droplets.
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The most important reason for using this is because by encapsulating single cells in these droplets the full secretome is contained.
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So you can analyse cytokines or any type of non catalytic proteins that the cells secrete will stay with these droplets as long as you have a fluorescent assay or some sort of detection signal.
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All you need to make droplets is 3 preparing steps.
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So the workflow is very simple.
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We have these contained cartridges that you can come to our booth and see.
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We have examples and all you need is 3 preparing steps.
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So you add the reaction mixture or your cells, some of our reagents and then your outer buffer you put in the cartridge in the instrument.
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And then within 8 minutes you have a million droplets that you can then assay.
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Our cartridges allow you to work with eight different samples in parallel.
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So you can have eight different patient samples or eight different assays within one cartridge.
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And it would take one, it would take 8 minutes for to produce 1 million droplets 8 times.
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There are two possible ways to then go from there.
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So you'd use the Xdrop or Xdrop sort or to generate your droplets from then you can either use the extra sort to then sort these droplets out, or you can take these droplets after, incubate them, grow your cells or PCR, do some amplification and then you can take it to a fax and analyse it in the fax.
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So you take full advantages of the multi channels the fax has or the high dynamic range of faxes as well.
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It is very important to mention that after sorting, the cells are alive.
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So you can then break these droplets and grow these cells out as well.
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So we can add value to different stages of the development process.
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So we have examples where the X drop can add value to both target validation, screening and lead generation because of the high throughput. Lead optimization as well as process development and manufacturing.
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So for genomics applications, this is where Samplix started.
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So this was our core business for a long time.
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So in here what you would do is encapsulate your DNA with the appropriate primers of the target you're trying to validate.
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You amplify the DNA in the droplets and then with the extra sort you can then sort out all your amplified targets.
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You can do a second round of amplification if you don't have enough material and then you can break these droplets and then sequence the fragments.
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The important.
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So one of the applications that we have for this is validating insertion sites.
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So in here, for example, we have a lentivirus inserted into car T cells, a lentivirus insertion car T.
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And you can see there's multiple insertion sites by indicated by this red arrow here.
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So it's very important that we validate insertion sites because of the high variability of different cells, cell life immunological assays for example.
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So in here what we have done is we encapsulated single cells, activated them and using a common assay we have, it's just an off the shelf assay.
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We have then detected cytokine release in this case was TNF alpha and you can see that afterwards we put on a fax and you can detect analyse the living cells.
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What you can see here is the difference between a bulk assay and what a droplet assay would give you.
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So or a single cell assay in fact.
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So in the bulk assay, you'd have an average response of the non activated and then after activation with Samplix in our single cell assay or single cell droplet format, you can then see that you can select and sort out the your highest secretors or your most potent cells.
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These cells can then be broken out of these droplets grown out and they will retain their high secretion profile.
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So I have this slide.
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So here you can.
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You can see that after two weeks cultures, the cells that we sorted out that our highest secretors retain their high potential when compared to the cells that haven't been sorted out.
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So it is a very nice instrument for that as well.
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One of our most exciting assets is the fact that it's cell killing assets.
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So within the droplets you can do cell interaction assets.
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So you can encapsulate 2 single cells in one droplet, so an effector cell in a target cell and then see which ones or it didn't select your fastest killers for example.
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And you can do that on a fax or in our extra sort instrument as well.
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So what you can see here we have stained 1 cell red and another one green and we added propidium iodide and then after one hour, 2 hours, after every hour, we have then sorted out some and analysed which ones are the fastest killer.
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So we then we sorted out the fastest killers you can see here.
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So yeah, this is every hour or more or less every hour, and then you can sort out your fastest killers.
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We can have control.
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So you can see that cells are not dying just because they are in droplets, they are dying.
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So you can see that normally cell death is very low compared to before.
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Oops, I cannot go back compared to before.
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So normally cell death is very low.
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And then you could see that before cell death was much faster when they are encapsulated together with an NK cell, you can do multiplex assay.
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So you can do the cell killing together with cytokine detection as well.
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And what we are working towards right now is a granzyme B assay where you add all the granzyme B assay together with the cells.
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And you can see here how they activated in case the activated cells show a much higher fluorescence compared to negative.
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So these droplets can be analysed just enough flow, you can take them out, you can analyse them on a microscope, on a fax or flow cytometer.
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So yeah, so Xdrop adds value to every stage of the gene in cell therapy development.
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So you can analyse and validate your car insertion sites.
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You can do single cell assay functional assays, you can do cell interaction assays in droplets.
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It is compatible, as I mentioned with flow cytometry in fact, but we also have a sorter.
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The sales can be recovered and expanded.
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And most importantly, the assay is a very easy to do.
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So it's 3 preparing steps.
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You put the cartridge in the instrument and it's done.
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So thank you very much.
