RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARKCell Microsystems announced Tuesday that it was awarded $1.5 million under the National Institutes of Health SBIR program.

Cell Miccrosystems

The grant “will allow the company to develop a prototype of the innovative Air-Flow instrument, consumable cell culture and imaging device as well as molecular methods for subsequent RNA-Seq,” according to a release.  The grant will also help employ optical barcodes, which will enable cellular imaging data, generated by the new system, to be linked to genomic signatures.

“Among the commercially available options, no single instrument is capable of this fully-integrated workflow,” said Nick Trotta, Cell Microsystems’ director of product applications and market development, in a statement. “Linking imaging data to genomic data on a cell-by-cell basis for thousands of cells in a single experiment just isn’t feasible with the systems available today.”

The company has been awarded $6.8 million in NIH funding since February 2016, which has enabled the company to launch CellRaft System for Inverted Microscope,  automated Air System and varying versions of CytoSort Array.

Cell Microsystems is a  Research Triangle Park based-early growth stage instrumentation company that develops, manufactures and markets products for single cell biology.

This story is from the North Carolina Business News Wire, a service of the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Media and Journalism.