WaferGen Announces the Commercial Availability of the ICELL8 Single-Cell System

WaferGen Biosystems unveiled their ICELL8 Single-Cell System at ASHG. The commercial launch of this product extends the reach of WaferGen’s powerful SmartChip technology to a research community eager for new tools. Moving from very successful early access experiences at MD Anderson, Karolinska Institutet, Genentech and National Jewish Hospital the WaferGen team is now accepting orders with delivery in November.

Early access partner results presented at Single Cell Genomics Conference in Utrecht, The Netherlands and SelectBioscience in San Diego, California were met with great enthusiasm. Presented results include those from internal testing and early access partners at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The groundbreaking results demonstrate how thousands of single cells are isolated and specific cells of interest are processed for downstream analysis using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS).

The ICELL8 Single-Cell System was used to isolate up to 1,800 single cells per chip and cells were identified for processing using proprietary image analysis software. In one experiment a complex mixture of cell types, including K562, U-87 MG, Z138 and Hela cells were isolated in wells of a single chip. Additional experiments demonstrate the detection sensitivity by discerning a 1% cell population in a mixture. For both experiments the ICELL8 Single-Cell System was able to demonstrate unbiased cell dispensing across the chip. Unambiguous identification of cells from the selected wells was evidenced by the analysis of NGS data from ~100,000 sequencing reads per cell.

The ICELL8 Single-Cell System can be used to isolate tens of thousands of single cells. Individual cells can then be selected for processing using WaferGen’s proprietary image analysis software. The system enables running up to eight samples of various cell types and sizes on a single chip, thus allowing applications such as therapeutic dose determination and gene insertion/deletion efficacy studies. The ICELL8 Single-Cell System has been successfully used to process over 10 different cell types including live single neurons, human tumor cells, mouse tumor cells and nuclei. The ability of the system to process a broad range of samples, coupled with the ability to detect rare cell types with minimal sequencing costs, allows researchers to more accurately interrogate complex samples to find the genomic information critical to their research.