It has been a time of growth for life science technology company IsoPlexis Corp.The Yale spinout, headquartered at 35 NE Industrial Road in Branford, had its initial public offering in October and raised some $125 million. Last January, the company raised $135 million in a Series D round, with much of it going toward its […]
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It has been a time of growth for life science technology company IsoPlexis Corp.
The Yale spinout, headquartered at 35 NE Industrial Road in Branford, had its initial public offering in October and raised some $125 million. Last January, the company raised $135 million in a Series D round, with much of it going toward its ongoing expansion.
Since its commercial launch in 2018, IsoPlexis says its products have been adopted by researchers worldwide, including the top 15 biopharmaceutical companies by revenue, and about half of the nation’s comprehensive cancer centers.
The company’s technology can help with the development of personalized treatments for patients suffering from diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders.
IsoPlexis’ platform includes instruments and software. The technology captures single cell protein information then interprets the data for the development of advanced medicines, therapies and vaccines.
Researchers can analyze individual cells and the proteins they secrete to determine how patients will respond to therapies. The company has also been involved in studying COVID-19 and how it interacts with the immune system.
Originally founded in 2013, today the company has grown to include approximately 300 employees.
CEO Sean Mackay co-founded the company with Rong Fan, a professor of biomedical engineering at Yale University. Its technology comes from the labs of both Fan and James R. Heath, a chemistry professor at Caltech who serves on IsoPlexis’ board.
New Haven Biz recently chatted with Mackay about IsoPlexis’ technology, future and potential impact in the fight against devastating and deadly illnesses.
What does your company do exactly?
We have a chip technology that works on this IsoLight instrument system. What our systems do is they are able to detect these small subsets of human cells in our body that are superhero cells.
These superhero cells create these really highly active responses. They are important for fighting disease.
Are you dealing with blood samples, tissue samples?
All of the above.
The majority of the work we do is taking information from blood samples. We are then using that to teach our customers. Our customers are leveraging our technology to learn about how these subsets of superhero cells from the blood can create longer-term responses to cancer.
[Applications include] creating a better therapeutic that lasts longer. [In clinical trials] you are finding patient populations who have a high degree of immune health, and a high degree of response to the therapeutic.
That becomes really important for precision medicine, identifying patients who respond very well to a therapy against a disease.
Who are your customers?
We are really selling to the top 15 pharmaceutical companies, that is one part of our customer base. It is emerging biotechnology companies — people trying to leverage new biotech to advance new medicines. And academic medical centers. They are doing the most cutting-edge work, with the most cutting-edge clinical trials.
We are a research-use only system, so they are really advancing biomarker immune cell research, but that research is really informing how to take that next step and develop a more precise therapeutic that has long-term responses.
What was your reaction to the company going public in October?
This has been a journey. We spun out of Yale, and we had some contributions from Caltech as well. We built our tech and our company really out of a small Branford-based lab.
Today, we are at this place where we have hundreds of folks working for the company, all working hard on a goal to deliver to our customers this unique technology that leverages superhero cells to better understand earlier sources of how we create better, advanced medicines, against things like cancer and infectious disease.
We are pretty excited about it.
What prompted you to found the company?
I had been working in and around a number of different types of healthcare and life sciences companies in the past.
I met the professors who invented this technology, co-inventors out of Yale and Caltech. I think I was inspired by this idea that you could leverage new biology and harness it to better understand how to use our immune system to fight cancers.
Our idea was that we could really build this up into a large, high-impact, high-value company. It was inspired by these customers developing new therapeutics at the time, which were very early in the process. We believed that they were going to work.
How is your technology different?
It is these interesting and highly relevant superhero cells. Typically when you are using another technology, you can’t see these superhero cells, because you just aren’t able to isolate the cells.
In these single cell chambers, we measure how highly active they are. And because we are able to measure these superhero cells, we are really able to reveal a lot of new biology.
There are about 40,000 systems right now in the world that can measure the surface of the cell and understand how those cells play out.
But our ability to functionally define the cell for these superhero characteristics is unique. What we are seeing is, it is really a high need, as we emerge into pharma and academic medical centers.
Can your technology help combat a range of diseases?
Indeed. What we have seen is that our tech, leveraging these powerful sets of cells, has been used against various cancers, solid tumors, blood cancers, but also, more recently, we have been able to identify inflammatory reactions.
For example, in COVID-19. We have seen some precursors of transplant rejection, that is another area, so it is an interesting application. We are able to understand sources of the immune system, we call them supervillain responses, inflammatory responses against the self, by finding these hypercharged immune cells.
Is the company involved in the development of vaccines, such as for COVID-19?
We had some pretty important work in COVID-19 last year, it was published in the journal, Cell.
We were able to really detect early sources of inflammation, which is pretty much the worst part of getting COVID. You have this bad inflammation that sends people to the ICU. Information like that becomes very important.
We are doing that type of work, and we hope to be a part of contributing to that understanding of how to power and leverage our immune system against cancers, infectious diseases and inflammatory diseases in the future.
What are your annual revenues?
Revenue for the fiscal years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, was $7.5 million and $10.4 million, respectively, and revenue for the six months ended June 30, 2020 and 2021, was $3.7 million and $7.5 million, respectively.
How is the company using the money it raised in the past year?
We raised $135 million back in January and we raised another $125 million in the IPO. A lot of the expansion has gone into hiring new people. They are going into our commercial team, which is incredibly important as we expand worldwide, not only domestically, but all the international regions, including Europe and Asia/Pacific.
We will really continue to scale up operations. We grew at 103% revenue-wise through the first half of the year. What you need to do is manufacture, operate and deliver to that demand. We have expanded our footprint in Connecticut.
We believe so much in the innovation in our industry, and we are continuing to hire people to innovate. We will really invest in research and development, come out with great products, and continue to solve critical problems.
Where do you see the company in five years? 10 years?
Right now, the main source of our business is we sell our systems and we generate this amazing single-cell proteomic [the study of proteins and their functions] data.
We have multiple other product lines that work on our systems coming out, and those include looking more around the blood, for proteins. We have products that look at the DNA, so doing sequencing. We have a real chance here to highly influence how people develop and then deliver these really complex therapeutics.
It has been an incredible journey what we have done for the past seven or so years here in Connecticut. We are excited for the next 10 years.
There is so much new biology that is out there. The people we have are working hard and will continue to work hard to deliver on high expectations for us in the coming years.
