Time and Cost Savings with High-Throughput Automation

A key feature of the MIMIC™ model is its well-based format. The MIMIC™ model consists of a 96-well plate that contains the two main MIMIC components: the vaccination site and the lymphoid tissue equivalent. Each of the wells is equivalent to one immune system that can be used for testing. This well-based format is what gives the MIMIC™ system much of its advantage over current drug discovery and testing processes. With each plate holding essentially 96 immune systems, it is now possible to rapidly test vaccines and immune modulator drugs against different immune system environments and do so in an automated fashion. The well-based format gives scientists and researchers a great amount of control over their tests, especially when compared with animal testing methods.

Our entire clinical trial in a well technology is automated, from blood process to fabrication of the MIMIC technology, to characterization of the biomolecules and immunocytes:

• Step 1: Cell Processing
  • Ficoll
  • Platelet washing
  • Cell isolation steps
• Step 2: MIMIC model fabrication
  • Vaccination Site Module
  • Lymphoid Tissue Equivalent Modeule
  • PBMC Assays
• Step 3: Characterization
  • Intracellular cytokine staining (ICCS)
  • Flow cytometry
  • ELISA
  • ELISpot

Key components for MIMIC™ models include microtiter plates, collagen, cell media, endothelial cell lines and other cell lines, human PBMCs, and reagents needed to select cells and measure responses. All of these components are commercially available at reasonable cost. Human PBMCs are collected from donors via standard methods. VaxDesign currently uses local blood banks as a source of PBMCs, but we plan to source PBMCs from multiple blood banks in the near future. We also plan to create cell banks to track and store commercial cell lines and PBMCs. For PBMCs, we will collect standard information about donors to enable demographic variation in our models.

Time Savings via Automation

	Time Required
	Manual	Automation
Blood Processing	2.5 labor hours	1 labor hour
Vaccination Site	24 hours per 32 plates	6 hours per 32 plates
ELISA	40 hours per 36 plates	3 hours per 36 plates
ELISPOT	40 hours per 32 plates	10 hours per 32 plates

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