Harvard stem cell research lab adopts the BioFlux system

South San Francisco, California, May 11, 2011 – Fluxion Biosciences announced today that the Karp Laboratory at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) has purchased the BioFlux 1000 system, which will be applied in their stem cell homing research. Dr. Jeffrey Karp is an Assistant Professor at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Department of Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Principal Faculty at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (for more information visit www.karplab.net). He also co-directs the BWH Center for Regenerative Therapeutics. A major focus of Dr. Karp’s research is the development of stem cell based therapeutics to address tissue and organ replacement.

“We’re delighted with the BioFlux 1000 system and its application to our stem cell homing work,” said Dr. Karp. “Understanding mesenchymal stem cell homing is critical to our efforts toward development of programmable stem cell therapies, but the manual approaches previously available in the lab were too slow for the large number of experiments required. The BioFlux 1000 system provides our lab with high experimental throughput and reproducibility, allowing us to focus on the critical aspects of our translational research and on making targeted stem cell therapies a reality.”

The BioFlux system uses microfluidic plates to create precisely controlled cellular environments that mimic living tissues. The system provides automated control of the cellular environment, including such parameters as temperature, flow, chemical and gas composition of the media, as well as automated imaging. The BioFlux 1000 system can be used to study cellular interactions that are important to understanding processes such as chemotaxis, cell migration, and tissue regeneration. Introduced in 2007, the BioFlux system is used globally by leading pharmaceutical companies and research institutes, including the NIH, Cornell University, China Academy of Chinese Medicine, Stanford, Merck, Sanofi-Aventis, BMS, Bayer, Amgen, and Genentech.

”It’s exciting to see the adoption of the BioFlux 1000 system at a world class research institution, and its use in the development of a novel application for stem cell research” said Jeff Jensen, Chief Executive Officer at Fluxion Biosciences. “There is an increasing need in academic labs for higher throughput systems that allow screening across a broad spectrum of variables affecting cellular processes, and this sale validates the role of the BioFlux platform in the development of stem cell technologies for regenerative medicine.”