# High Throughput & Quantitative Cell Purification for ImmunotherapyManufacture

> **NIH NIH R44** · FERROLOGIX, INC. · 2020 · $920,268

## Abstract

Project Summary
Therapies based on Chimeric Antigen Receptors (CAR) or T Cell Receptors (TCR) have shown incredible
potential as personalized immunotherapies for cancer patients which involves enrichment and modification of
immune cells to express targeting moieties against cancer cells. Studies have shown that deriving therapies
from well-defined sets of cell subpopulations have superior potency and sustained reaction compared to
therapies derived from heterogenous populations and represents a direction of growth for the cell therapy
industry in order to take on more complex and elusive diseases. Unfortunately, current cell purification
platforms, such as flow cytometry and magnetic assisted cell sorting, struggle to balance the throughput and
quantitative power needed to precisely enrich the target cell subpopulations for scalable manufacture of
precision immunotherapies. We reasoned that a tool that balanced quantitative cell sorting capacity with high
throughput operation would alleviate this bottleneck and enable development of more nuanced and
multifaceted therapies. With preliminary studies, we demonstrated a prototype platform based on a technique
called ratcheting cytometry that can achieve quantitative sorting of target cell subpopulations by multiplexing
on magnetic bead strength. In this proposal, we aim to develop a high throughput batch purification cartridge
and instrument that can precisely enrich target cell subpopulations directly from complex biomatrix samples,
such as a leukopak or apheresis product. In phase I we will focus on optimizing the quantitative separation
parameters to maximize capture and purity of multiple target cell types. In phase II we will focus on scaling the
platform to meet with cell manufacturing throughput requirements.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10230446
- **Project number:** 4R44CA228844-02
- **Recipient organization:** FERROLOGIX, INC.
- **Principal Investigator:** Coleman Murray
- **Activity code:** R44 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $920,268
- **Award type:** 4N
- **Project period:** 2020-09-08 → 2022-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10230446

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10230446, High Throughput & Quantitative Cell Purification for ImmunotherapyManufacture (4R44CA228844-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10230446. Licensed CC0.

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