Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TrueCell (A microfluidic chip for automating three-dimensional cell culture for personalized medicine)
Berichtszeitraum: 2018-01-08 bis 2020-01-07
Cell culture is a process which is becoming increasingly important in the fields of research and in clinics, for applications ranging from in vitro modeling, to drug testing, cell therapy, and in vitro fertilization. An important issue with cell culture is that it requires a lot of manual intervention, which makes this task time-consuming, and prone to mistakes and variability. Today there is a lack of tools to automate cell culture, without which data scientists have a hard time streamlining many of their tasks or saving precious time and ensuring the reliability and quality of their results. As cell culture moves closer to clinics and patients, ensuring a high-quality control is becoming key to ensure efficiency for scientists and safety for patients.
While originally the fellowship’s objective consisted in creating a microfluidic platform to standardize 3D cell culture, it became clear that another area of cell culture could benefit more rapidly from new automation tools in a separate area of cell culture: cell imaging. A core tasks for cell culture scientists consists in imaging cells during their culture, to ensure their viability and to extract key morpho-kinetic information. As of today, a growing number of hardware equipment is being developed to automate this imaging process, generating unprecedented volumes of data that are hard to exploit. This need is particularly obvious in the field of in vitro fertilization (IVF), where embryologists image embryos as they develop in the lab prior to their implantation back in the patient. Today, IVF clinicians lack the tools to extract key information from these videos to make reliable and data-driven decisions, such as choosing the embryo with the highest chance of implantation. Through her Marie Curie fellowship, Dr. Alexandra Boussommier-Calleja has co-founded her company ImVitro, aimed at combining the power of cell imaging and artificial intelligence to tackle infertility. ImVitro aims at developing AI-based tools that help embryologists in personalizing their decisions, starting with the evaluation of embryos during their culture, so as to minimize the number of IVF cycles patients have to go through to conceive a child. Needless to say, that these tools could have a huge impact given that today one out of seven couples suffer from infertility. For them, IVF represents one of their main medical hope, which however only works 20-30% of the times.
The objectives therefore became to develop a software that can take in videos of embryos and give back a score to clinicians. To that end, we first needed to create traction with clinics, to create strong partnerships with clinics, to collect data, and to fundraise. The overall goal remained for the Fellow to create a company around this vision and commercialize this product. By the end of the fellowship, the fellow had created a company, obtained a grant to accelerate the project and developed partnerships with fertility clinics.
While originally the fellowship’s objective consisted in creating a microfluidic platform to standardize 3D cell culture, it became clear that another area of cell culture could benefit more rapidly from new automation tools in a separate area of cell culture: cell imaging. A core tasks for cell culture scientists consists in imaging cells during their culture, to ensure their viability and to extract key morpho-kinetic information. As of today, a growing number of hardware equipment is being developed to automate this imaging process, generating unprecedented volumes of data that are hard to exploit. This need is particularly obvious in the field of in vitro fertilization (IVF), where embryologists image embryos as they develop in the lab prior to their implantation back in the patient. Today, IVF clinicians lack the tools to extract key information from these videos to make reliable and data-driven decisions, such as choosing the embryo with the highest chance of implantation. Through her Marie Curie fellowship, Dr. Alexandra Boussommier-Calleja has co-founded her company ImVitro, aimed at combining the power of cell imaging and artificial intelligence to tackle infertility. ImVitro aims at developing AI-based tools that help embryologists in personalizing their decisions, starting with the evaluation of embryos during their culture, so as to minimize the number of IVF cycles patients have to go through to conceive a child. Needless to say, that these tools could have a huge impact given that today one out of seven couples suffer from infertility. For them, IVF represents one of their main medical hope, which however only works 20-30% of the times.
The objectives therefore became to develop a software that can take in videos of embryos and give back a score to clinicians. To that end, we first needed to create traction with clinics, to create strong partnerships with clinics, to collect data, and to fundraise. The overall goal remained for the Fellow to create a company around this vision and commercialize this product. By the end of the fellowship, the fellow had created a company, obtained a grant to accelerate the project and developed partnerships with fertility clinics.
For the first year, the fellow focused on developing a microscope that computes the viability and density of cells during their expansion in 2D to minimize variability in cell culture and any downstream experiments such as microfluidic cellular models. In summary, this innovative tool was meant to provide:
a- Hardware to image at high resolution cells in different areas of a culture area
b- Software to segment images and compute cell density, and doubling time
c- Interface software for the user to be able to interact with the machine
Thus the fellow performed varying tasks, ranging from prototyping of the hardware (3D modeling, 3D printing etc) to designing cutting-edge electronic boards to handle several cameras, to writing codes to create the interface and to segment images, to imaging cells in culture in the lab.
At that stage, the fellow decided to pivot in two ways: a- move away from designing hardware b- move away from fundamental research needs towards more clinical ones, in particular, in that of the IVF field.
From there on, the fellow focused much of her energy in developing partnerships with IVF clinics to obtain precious data, and in fundraising for the company that would promote this project. This was key to further her career development goals, that consisted mainly of using this fellowship to become an entrepreneur and take an idea from the lab to the market.
By the end of the fellowship, the fellow had co-founded the company which had developed a proof of concept (i.e. an algorithm that can predict the chances of couples to conceive). The fellow had developed a vision and a business plan, obtained pre-seed investment and a public grant. The fellow pitched in front of many investors at several events, and had made contact with more than 70 VC funds to present the company’s pitch deck to fundraise a seed round.
a- Hardware to image at high resolution cells in different areas of a culture area
b- Software to segment images and compute cell density, and doubling time
c- Interface software for the user to be able to interact with the machine
Thus the fellow performed varying tasks, ranging from prototyping of the hardware (3D modeling, 3D printing etc) to designing cutting-edge electronic boards to handle several cameras, to writing codes to create the interface and to segment images, to imaging cells in culture in the lab.
At that stage, the fellow decided to pivot in two ways: a- move away from designing hardware b- move away from fundamental research needs towards more clinical ones, in particular, in that of the IVF field.
From there on, the fellow focused much of her energy in developing partnerships with IVF clinics to obtain precious data, and in fundraising for the company that would promote this project. This was key to further her career development goals, that consisted mainly of using this fellowship to become an entrepreneur and take an idea from the lab to the market.
By the end of the fellowship, the fellow had co-founded the company which had developed a proof of concept (i.e. an algorithm that can predict the chances of couples to conceive). The fellow had developed a vision and a business plan, obtained pre-seed investment and a public grant. The fellow pitched in front of many investors at several events, and had made contact with more than 70 VC funds to present the company’s pitch deck to fundraise a seed round.
At this stage, the fellow has co-founded her company ImVitro, raised pre-seed funds through the accelerator program Entrepreneur First and is in the process of raising a seed round to accelerate her company. The fellow has spent significant time creating strong partnerships with 8 clinics in France and Spain, and ImVitro has created a proof of concept algorithm that can predict the chances of success for couples who go through IVF. The company is now growing, having hired its first senior data scientist, and will soon be looking to hire more employees.
The impact of these tools will be that of significantly reducing the number of IVF cycles patients have to go through to conceive a child, and to increase transparency and control quality in the IVF process.
The impact of these tools will be that of significantly reducing the number of IVF cycles patients have to go through to conceive a child, and to increase transparency and control quality in the IVF process.