Theresa Curtis, Biological Sciences Department, was awarded a new National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research grant to develop and commercialize a new instrument to assist researchers in characterizing cells.
In this collaborative grant, Curtis will be working with the company Applied BioPhysics Inc., Troy, N.Y., and statisticians from Cornell and Mount Holyoke College. The device is based on Electric Cell-substrate Impedance Sensing (ECIS), a well-established technology using impedance measurements to quantify cell morphology and behavior. The research group proposes to take advantage of the multivariant nature of the ECIS measurement to ultimately select features that, when plotted in a 2 or 3-dimensional coordinate system, will allow the user to visually confirm the identity of their cells as well as detect subtle unwanted anomalies in culture that could jeopardize experimental results. Animal cell culture plays an indispensable role in biological and biomedical research and the production of biopharmaceuticals, but misidentification of cell lines, subtle forms of contamination, as well as epigenetic changes often affect the outcomes of experiments. With the grant money ($154,772) coming to SUNY Cortland, Curtis will be able to pay students during the semester and over the summer for two years to work on this project.