Our Deterministic Mechanoporation (DMP) gene delivery technology platform – which we call Celletto™ – is a new, nanomechanical approach for delivering virtually any gene (or other payload) to the nucleus of cells, en masse, while achieving high transfection efficiency and high cell viability. In doing so, it addresses longstanding limitations inherent to prevailing viral and non-viral delivery techniques, and thus, opens new opportunity for transforming the engineering of ex vivo cell and gene therapies (CGTs).
DMP uses fluid flow to drag each cell in suspension onto its own dedicated nanoscale needle, causing poration of both the plasma and nuclear membrane in the process. The cells are then pushed off the needles by reversing flow, after which gene delivery occurs by diffusion of the payload through the single transient pore produced in each cell.
Poration of every cell, in the same manner, ensures high uniformity, while limiting poration to a single, precision incision in each cell minimizes damage and provides a path for delivery to the nucleus. The absence of moving parts minimizes complexity and enables massive parallelization, thus ensuring the opportunity for scaling to the throughputs required for CGT applications.
Our technology’s superiority lies in its unique ability to safely and precisely produce a singular pore in both the plasma and nuclear membranes in each and every cell in a large population. This is key because it allows us to achieve:
High delivery efficiency AND high cellular viability
Direct intranuclear delivery
Uniform treatment of all cells in the population.
This stands in contrast to other non-viral techniques (e.g., electroporation, shear poration, chemical poration, etc.), which typically suffer from poor uniformity, and often force users to choose between efficiency or viability, due to their reliance upon inherently random poration mechanisms, and their inability to reliably or precisely breach the nuclear envelope.