The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to address a key challenge in the response to COVID-19, namely manufacturing sufficient quantities of novel therapeutics and vaccines. This project can shorten the development times of drugs by as much as 6 months, accelerating translation of new therapeutics. This technology will also enable more testing, thereby increasing the performance and potentially reducing the side effects of these drugs.This SBIR Phase I project advances the manufacturing of biologics, which starts with a high performing clonal cell line derived (by definition) from a single cell. Developing such a cell line today takes up to 6 months due to iterative screening and testing to assure quality and performance. The proposed project aims to enable selection of a high performing cell clone in one day compared to many months by using a proprietary single cell proteomics platform, at an unprecedented throughput rather than lengthy, iterative selection, clonal expansion and analytics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
