CytoRecovery Awarded National Science Foundation Phase II SBIR Research Grant
Provides funding of $952,000 to advance the Company’s revolutionary CytoR1 platform for the rapid sorting and recovery of live cells.
BLACKSBURG, Virginia USA, 8:30AM ET, February 9, 2023 – CytoRecovery, Inc., a leader in marker free technologies for the enrichment, sorting, and recovery of live cells, announced today that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has approved its application to receive a Phase II SBIR Research Grant. Titled “Bioelectrical Cell Enrichment, Sorting, and Recovery with On-Chip Sample Prep and Monitoring,” the grant will provide $952,558 in research funding to develop new features that will be embodied in the Company’s next generation CytoR2 Platform for advanced cell sorting.
The research will be conducted in the laboratories of Dr. Rafael Davalos, Virginia Tech’s L. Preston Wade Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Dr. Nathan Swami, UVA Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the CytoRecovery laboratory located at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center (VT CRC) in Blacksburg, VA, under the direction of Dr. Alex Hyler, who is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the NSF grant.
“We are pleased to receive this prestigious SBIR research grant from the NSF and for the validation of our technology that it represents,” stated Dr. Hyler. She added, “As medicine moves towards personalized care, more precise cell recovery is required for research and pharmaceutical development, especially in the new fields of cell therapeutics and genomics. To address this challenge, we have brought to market our CytoR1 Platform - a label-free, fully-integrated product system for cell sorting, enrichment, and recovery.”
The funding will be used to advance features, progress software, and develop new technologies for cell sorting, including integrating the processes of cell sample preparation and expanding capabilities to monitor cells in the Company’s proprietary, microfluidic chips.
The CytoR1 is a fully-integrated, benchtop cell enrichment and recovery product system, which uses sterile, disposable microchips to rapidly separate and recover live cell subpopulations which improves the quality of recovered samples. Cell separation workflows are foundational to medical research, and the Company’s CytoR1 Platform is revolutionary in its ability to discern and rapidly recover populations of live cells by exploiting biophysical differences, thereby providing more accurate insight into human disease. The Company believes its technologies will become widely adopted for use in the fields of regenerative medicine, oncology, neurology, and drug development, enabling the Company to build a new, global life science business franchise.
The Company received the Award Notice on February 6, 2023. The NSF award is made subject to the NSF Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)/ Phase II Cooperative Agreement Financial & Administrative Terms and Conditions.
About CytoRecovery:
CytoRecovery has developed and markets the CytoR1 Platform, an integrated, benchtop cell sorting system that can enrich, sort, and recover live cell subpopulations from tissue and other sample types without the use of molecular markers. The Company’s proprietary technology uniquely enables the recovery of specific live cell subpopulations without altering the cells by exploiting biophysical differences in cell phenotypes. This label-free approach improves the quality of the cell samples recovered, providing more accurate representation of human disease, and enabling their maintenance and viability for further use in biomedical research procedures.
About the NSF: The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports science and engineering in all 50 states and U.S. territories. NSF was established in 1950 by Congress to promote the progress of science, advance the national health, prosperity and welfare, and secure the national defense. NSF is tasked with keeping the U.S. at the leading edge of discovery in science and engineering, to the benefit of all, without barriers to participation. NSF investments account for about 25% of federal support to America's colleges and universities for basic research. NSF supports research partnerships between colleges and universities, industry, nonprofits, government and other organizations within the U.S. and across the globe. NSF investments focus on sparking new ideas and create approaches that can accelerate discovery & transform knowledge into tangible benefits to society.
For more information:
https://www.nsf.gov
CytoRecovery, Inc.
1872 Pratt Dr., #1350 Blacksburg, VA 24060
contactus@cytorecovery.com
Ph 540.961.7871