This PoC project Serial-X aimed to develop technologies leading to the formation of a small company which would expand of the use of serial crystallography across the academic and industrial life-science community. Serial-X would achieve this goal by introducing low cost, flexible and easy to use solutions to the problem of sample delivery in serial crystallography experiments at synchrotron radiation facilities. These solutions were invented in and ongoing ERC Advanced Grant called ProtonPump, which applies time-resolved serial crystallography to observe structural changes in the enzyme cytochrome c oxidase.
Serial crystallography is a sub-discipline of macromolecular crystallography in which X-ray diffraction data are collected sequentially from thousands of randomly oriented microcrystals of proteins, RNA or DNA, that are continuously being replaced. This is very different from traditional, and very successful, approaches to macromolecular X-ray crystallography, for which X-ray diffraction data is usually collected from a single, relatively large crystal cooled to cryogenic temperature. For more than half a century, X-ray crystallographic studies of the macromolecules of living cells (proteins, DNA, RNA) have had tremendous impact on life-science and more than 160 000 X-ray structures have been deposited in the protein data bank (
https://www.rcsb.org/stats(si apre in una nuova finestra)) using traditional crystallographic data-collection methods. Serial crystallography offers another approach to X-ray diffraction data-collection and this has proven to be extremely successful for time-resolved X-ray diffraction studies, which of necessity must be performed at room-temperature (Bränden & Neutze, Advances and challenges in time-resolved macromolecular crystallography, Science 373, eaba0954, 2021).
Serial crystallography is currently going through a period of rapid development and the number of scientific users of this method has the potential to rapidly grow. Nevertheless, this potential cannot be realized if large entry-barriers remain for new users of serial crystallography. Serial-X recognized that the current lack of standardization in sample delivery technologies, which are often prohibitively expensive, sometimes unreliable, and usually require specialized expertise to operate, is one of the largest barriers to the growth of the serial crystallography. Serial-X aims to solve this problem by developing and bringing to market standardized, low-cost, flexible and easy-to-use solutions for sample delivery in serial crystallography studies at synchrotron radiation sources. As such, Serial-X aimed to use the process of commercialization to remove one of the greatest obstacles currently preventing scientists from using serial crystallography for their own research, or for structure-based drug-design within a pharmaceutical drug discovery context.
This PoC project has been successful and in December 2021 SerialX AB was registered as a Swedish company that both manufactures and distributes the technologies developed within this ERC project. We have made a small number of initial sales to build up an initial customer base; we have established strong collaborations with two synchrotron radiation facilities within Europe as well as interest at synchrotron radiation facilities outside of Europe; and we have performed some initial evaluation studies with local industry. The most valuable investment of the project was to be able to employ a postdoc who was completely committed to driving this project forward. Without this support from the ERC PoC we would not possibly have been able to bring this project towards commercialization. Although at an early stage, it seems likely that there is a market sufficiently large to enable the spin-off company SerialX to succeed and grow into the future.
