Scribe Biosciences

I assume Scribe Biosciences is no longer active. The ex-CEO now works at Mission Bio and the CSO is at Bio-Techne.

Of course, just because a company is dead doesn’t mean it’s no longer of interest. In many ways I’m more interested in maintaining a record of approaches that have failed.

So let’s have a poke around. Firstly I recommend read Dale Yuzuki’s excellent post on the company and the issues microfluidic approaches have faced.

The core of the Scribe technology is an microfluidic system that allows them to assembly collections of cells/reagents in isolated droplets:

From this publication

As Dale points out this can be important for applications like CAR-T where you’re looking at T-cell/cancer interactions. Companies like Cellchorus (which I recently wrote about) can also play in this space.

Unlike Cellchorus however the Scribe system did not monitor cell-cell interactions in realtime. Instead they sort cells (based on a fluorescence assay).

Patents show an integrated device where droplets are generated, assembled and sorted in a single (I assume disposable) device:

Here they show the following “chips” built on the same base substrate:

• Drop making chip

• Assembly chip

• Sort chip

There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of experimental/real devices in this patent, and earlier videos show the processes broken out on to separate devices:

From this video

So I assume Scribe were still in the process of integrating everything into a signal cartridge. Earlier patents show the assembly process on real devices: