System Isolates More than 10,000 Single Cells per Day and Automatically Selects Cells to Process

WaferGen Bio-systems has announced that the Company will commence the commercial launch of the ICELL8™ Single-Cell System at the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) Annual Meeting taking place October 6-8, 2015, in Baltimore, MD. The system will create a new standard for single-cell analysis, enabling unbiased isolation of up to 1,800 single cells on a single chip. The system includes an imaging station for rapid image capture and CellSelect™ software for automatic selection of cells of interest for further processing for RNA sequencing. The system also allows researchers to run multiple samples on a single chip, enabling applications that require investigation under uniform conditions.

“We are pleased that the ICELL8 Single-Cell System will now be available to deliver what the single-cell research community has requested: greater cell isolation capabilities, control over the selection of isolated cells and the ability to run multi-sample experiments,” said Rollie Carlson, CEO of WaferGen.

The ICELL8 Single-Cell System provides the following:

• Power – Poisson distribution for isolation of up-to 1,800 single-cells on a single chip using multi-sample nano-liter dispense technology that accommodates cell sizes from 5-100um in a single sample. The rapid and simple cell isolation and imaging protocol ensures that multiple chips can be processed in a single 8-hour day.
• Control – CellSelect software allows for complete user-guided selection, as well as automatic determination of wells having individual cells to select for down-stream applications.
• Insight – By enabling the analysis of up-to 8 samples on a single chip, complex experimental designs can now be accomplished in single-cell research.

“In order to conduct as thorough an evaluation of the ICELL8 Single-Cell System as possible, we sought both world-class early access collaborators who were experienced single cell researchers, as well as those just embarking on this exciting new frontier. We invited these researchers to test the system using challenging cell types, including cells directly from human subjects, and we were quite pleased to see the robust performance of the system under these conditions,” said Dr. Maithreyan Srinivasan, WaferGen’s Chief Technology Officer.

Extensive results with early access partners and in-house WaferGen research and development initiatives presented at the Single Cell Genomics 2015 conference demonstrated the system’s performance and utility; successfully processing various cell types, including live single neurons, human tumor cells, mouse tumor cells and nuclei. Further, the system has been shown to detect rare cell types with minimal sequencing costs, allowing researchers to more accurately interrogate complex samples to find the genomic information critical to their research. The ICELL8 Single-Cell System is the first single-cell analysis system to offer the scale of isolation, the control of cell selection and the openness of study design to truly expand single-cell analysis.