The National Institutes of Health (NIH), via its National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), has awarded Kinetic River Corp. a two-year Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to “support continued design, engineering, and validation efforts toward commercialization of [the company’s] new cell-analysis technology.

After a successful Phase I feasibility project — also funded by NIGMS (an NIH institute that fosters extramural research focused on the development of biomedical diagnostic and therapeutic platforms) — the company, which develops custom flow cytometry and other biomedical instrumentation, aims to produce a compensation-free, 14-parameter flow cytometer for use in biomedical research as well as pharmaceutical research and discovery.

“After our success in Phase I, we knew we had something worth developing further,” said Giacomo Vacca, president of Kinetic River Corp. “Since then, we have continued to devote our own resources to this line of research because we believe it has game-changing potential. With the financial support this grant provides, we are now going full steam ahead.”

Kinetic River’s Arno technology uses time-resolved fluorescence signatures “to add a new dimension of discrimination to cell labeling, enabling a significant reduction in cross-channel spectral contamination.” This will eliminate the need to compensate for spectral spillover and increase ease-of-use compared to conventional flow cytometers. According to Kinetic River, their approach also reduces the number of lasers and detectors needed for a given number of fluorescence detection channels. It also uses standard fluorophores and established flow cytometry workflows, and is compatible with sorting.

The compensation-free, 14-parameter analyzer now under development is the first of several products planned for the Arno technology platform.

Kinetic River Corp., based in Mountain View, Calif., is a biophotonics design and product development company that specializes in life science research and biomedical applications.