STRATEC Consumables and Vortex Biosciences Announce Manufacturing Partnership

Vortex BioSciences, a NetScientific portfolio company and STRATEC Consumables GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary of STRATEC Biomedical AG, Birkenfeld, Germany, announced the signing of a supply agreement covering a customized microfluidic polymer chip. This chip is a key component of the VTX-1 instrument, an automated liquid biopsy platform which provides a simple, label free isolation of circulating tumor cells directly from a tube of blood.

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This microfluidic research platform was developed in Dino Di Carlo’s Lab at UCLA which has been successfully transferred to the commercial VTX-1 Liquid Biopsy System. The label-free microfluidic device utilizes inertial lift and laminar microvortices, allowing larger and more deformable cancer cells to be collected while smaller cells such as red and white blood cells pass through. With this technology, Vortex BioSciences is offering the best available liquid biopsy platform for CTC isolation and collection from patient samples.

Adapting the design to a commercial scale microfluidic device can be guaranteed at STRATEC at their ISO-13485 certified facility in Salzburg, Austria. By offering technical capabilities from initial concept through mass manufacturing, STRATEC can ensure silicon precision in plastics and high reproducibility.

“We are delighted to be partnering with STRATEC to fabricate our microfluidic chip. This chip is the essential element of our label-free technology to enable an efficient and fully-automated patient sample processing”, said Bob Englert, Chief Executive Officer at Vortex Biosciences. “The transfer from a variable research-level polymer prototype to a robust and reproducible plastic commercial chip is a key part of a successful transfer of technology to the market. This ultimately enables CTCs to be more widely used in cancer research and become part of the standard of care”, said Elodie Sollier, Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder at Vortex Biosciences.

“Bringing the Vortex chip into mass-manufacturing was a very exciting project for us. Vortex is inspiring both in its benefit to the constantly maturing liquid biopsy market, as well as in their balance of being science-driven but focused on commercialization. It is exactly with companies like Vortex where we see our big strength in actively participating in the transformation process of a new technology from a lab idea, or early prototypes to an actual medical product, eventually fit for the IVD market”, says Maximilian Pitzek, Project Manager at STRATEC Consumables.

About Vortex BioSciences

Vortex Biosciences is a cancer research and diagnostics company that integrates cancer biology, microfluidic engineering and informatics to develop tools for isolating and characterizing circulating tumor cells. The Vortex VTX-1 instrument harvests intact circulating tumor cells from whole blood samples for use in downstream research and potentially clinical applications such as patient stratification in clinical trials, monitoring disease progression and drug treatment effectiveness. With a mission to enable noninvasive diagnosis of cancer and real-time monitoring throughout a patient’s treatment, Vortex is at the forefront of accelerating cancer research and improving patient outcomes. Vortex is a core subsidiary of NetScientific plc, a transatlantic healthcare technology group with an investment strategy focused on sourcing, funding and commercializing technologies that significantly improve the health and well-being of people with chronic diseases.

For more information, visit www.vortexbiosciences.com.

About STRATEC

STRATEC Biomedical AG (www.stratec.com) designs and manufactures fully automated analyzer systems for its partners in the fields of clinical diagnostics and biotechnology. Furthermore, the company offers sample preparation solutions, integrated laboratory software, and complex consumables for diagnostic and medical applications. STRATEC covers the entire value chain – from development to design and production through to quality assurance.

The partners market the systems, software and consumables, in general together with their own reagents, as system solutions to laboratories, blood banks, and research institutes around the world. STRATEC develops its products on the basis of its own patented technologies.

For more information please visit www.stratec.com/solutions/consumables

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Contact information

Vortex BioSciences
Bob Englert, CEO
Vortex Biosciences Inc
bob@vortexbiosciences.com
or
STRATEC Consumables
Ricarda Pichler
STRATEC Consumables GmbH
+ 43 6248 880 8919
r.pichler@stratec.com