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NGP. Can you give a little background to the company and describe some of the standout achievements?
CO. Nanopoint, Inc. is a privately-held nano-biotechnology company that is revolutionizing the study and treatment of diseases with its live cell imaging solutions. Nanopoint's cellTRAY Imaging System has broad applications to life science research, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical production as well as other areas where live cell analysis is important.

In 2006, Nanopoint introduced the world’s first live cell microarray called cellTRAY; a microscope slide sized device with thousands of etched wells and fluidic channels to contain small groups of cells for culturing, imaging, treatment, and analysis.

In 2007, Nanopoint won the BusinessWeek/ISDA International Design Excellence Award with its cellTRAY taking gold in the Medical and Scientific Products Category. The contest recognizes the ‘best of the best from the US, Asia, and Europe.’ Nanopoint was one of only 81 winners in a field of 1691 entries with its novel microfluidic device.

In June 2008, Nanopoint launched its cellTRAY Imaging System Model CT-2000. The miniaturized microfluidics and stage-mounted incubator, along with robust software for fluidics control and image acquisition, allows an experiment to remain on an inverted microscope platform for extended periods of time, thus enabling time-lapse imaging of live cells over the course of several days.

NGP. What is live cell imaging and what benefits does it bring?
CO. Observation, experimentation, and imaging of living cells are vital to understanding, diagnosing, and successfully treating human diseases. Researchers must understand how treatment with potential therapeutic compounds will affect specific cellular processes such as, protein and gene expression, cell division and multiplication, and cellular self-destruct programs.

Live cell imaging is one of the most important research modalities of today and is extremely important in bio-pharmaceutical production, where judging the viability and growth rate of cells is essential for optimizing cell culture media and production parameters. Cell-based assays provide the ability to obtain highly accurate data and in conjunction with live cell imaging, information closer to the real life model can be obtained, documented, and analyzed in detail. Watching cells and biological molecules such as DNA change, move, develop, and interact with other cells could help to clarify many of the unanswered questions about how living organisms work.

NGP. How can the life science industry apply time-lapse imaging to help with research, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical production?
CO. Until now, there has been no effective and easy to use technology that has allowed laboratory researchers to observe small groups of live cells, automatically acquire images and longitudinal data from those cells over an extended period of time, and obtain highly accurate data. Nanopoint's live cell imaging solutions enable researchers to obtain high quality, real time information about drug targets, lead compounds being tested, and their toxicity profiles. These new microfluidics-based, miniaturized technologies and their applications will lead to a significant reduction in drug discovery and development costs, and help reduce overall risk for pharmaceutical companies. Nanopoint's solutions also enable new types of cellular experimentation essential to accelerating developments in stem cell research and pharmacogenomics, which may lead to greater understanding of complex human diseases, their treatments, and ultimately, their prevention.

NGP. Can you tell us about miniaturization and microfluidics in biomedical applications?
CO. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are seeking ways of obtaining more accurate results while at the same time reducing the amount of expensive reagents and other materials used per experiment. Low volume well plates are able to reduce the reagent usage but have minimal impact on the accuracy or quality of the data collected during an experiment. Lab-on-a-chip devices designed for various types of chemical and cellular analyses can generally be classified either as microfluidic (based on microchannel networks) or microarray (based on well plate-type formats or microchips). These devices use very small amounts of materials but are typically designed to address a single requirement.

In key areas of drug discovery, such as chemical syntheses, screening of compounds and preclinical testing of drugs in living cells, microfluidic tools can make a useful contribution, and indeed represent an improvement on existing technologies. Novel reaction, manipulation, and analytical steps can be performed with microfluidic systems that are not accessible to other approaches since the key tools for manipulation inevitably have to be of similar dimensions to the analyzed sample. Therefore, microfluidics offers innovative technological opportunities for obtaining new information about biological systems.

NGP.Do you have any new product in the pipeline, which you think will make an impact in the life sciences industry?
CO. Nanopoint’s cellTRAY-based systems have been carefully designed to enable scientists to easily move from a Petri dish or well plate style of research to a more precise live cell imaging system. Each of the products has been designed to allow a methodical migration to the miniaturized research platform starting with the cellTRAY, a microscope slide-sized high precision etched device that can be used with any laboratory equipment supporting slides.

The cellTRAY holds multiple cells in an ordered array enabling automated processing and simultaneous monitoring of a large matrix of cells. Cells can be observed before and after replication allowing the researcher to monitor the response of cells to other stimuli. Ten regions on the cellTRAY can be individually addressed by the fluidics controller, allowing different reagents to be easily administered to each one independently. Nanopoint’s cellTRAY Manager software provides the navigation, camera, shutter and filter controls, auto-focus, and microfluidics control necessary for today’s demanding live cell imaging applications. The user can automatically acquire images and save those images for further analysis by third party products such as ImageJ, MetaMorph, ImagePro, CellProfiler and others.

The microscope stage-mounted environmental control system contains integrated temperature control and an air port providing regulated CO2 flow. The hinged glass cover on the miniature incubator is also used to minimize contamination while still allowing easy access to the cellTRAY.

The fluidics controller has a very small footprint with its vertically-oriented syringe pumps. The pumps are capable of delivering a variety of flow rates, programmable by the user. The volume of fluid in a single syringe will cover a four hour experiment. The volume is then automatically replaced from the fluid reservoir extending the experimental time to multiple days.

NGP. How would you like to see the company develop over the next 12-18 months?
CO. Our overall objective is to establish Nanopoint’s cellTRAY Imaging Systems as the solution of choice for live cell-based drug discovery applications, disease detection, and development of novel therapeutics. Nanopoint’s solutions are being designed and developed to match or exceed functionality offered by competitive products in the biomedical research and drug discovery market by offering significant value through:

• A slide-sized microfluidics device (cellTRAY) that supports multiple simultaneous experiments significantly improving the quality of data.
• A robust, microscope stage mounted incubator, enabling new time-lapse imaging applications.
• Easy-to-use, integrated hardware and software solutions to improve research staff productivity.
• A new set of optimized application protocols that exploit the imaging system’s capabilities.

With the commercial release of our new cellTRAY Imaging System, we hope to see significant market adoption through a set of collaborative partnerships with academic researchers, biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies. As a market-driven company, we will continue developing and delivering high-quality live cell imaging system solutions to meet the needs of our customers.

About Cathy Owen, CEO, President and Director, Nanopoint
She brings nearly 30 years of executive leadership, general business and entrepreneurial experience to Nanopoint, Inc. She joined Nanopoint in August 2004 after a successful 21- year career at IBM and leadership of two early-stage information technology startup companies in Silicon Valley and Hawaii.