Could you introduce us to Cytobank and underline the key achievements of the company since its establishment?

Cytobank was established in 2007 with the key focus of enabling the analysis and management of higher complexity single cell immune system data. The company was founded by three Ph.D.  students during their studies at Stanford University where they were gaining experience in phospho-flow cytometry. Phospho-flow is a type of cytometry that looks at the interior of a cell and measures the phosphorylation state of intracellular proteins at the single cell level. The students found, that with the existing manual analysis tools, they could not effectively analyze the more complex, higher parameter phosphor flow data. They decided to develop a platform with advanced algorithms which would be able to analyze higher complexity data. They also decided that it would be appropriate to put the tools on the cloud to leverage the scalable compute available in the cloud and to enble more effective data sharing between different collaborators. The tools can thus be utilized by basic, as well as translational researchers.

Initially, Cytobank was grant funded and had one contract with a large strategic. In 2012, Cytobank attracted a group of angel investors - primarily from tech companies - which had experience in developing robust scalable software solutions. They made an initial investment and also brought in engineers from their networks who scaled the code base.

What is the current footprint of Cytobank’s technology?

Today Cytobank has thousands of users located at leading medical research institutions, including Stanford and Harvard University, and top pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. In addition to maintaining strong relationships within academia, the company focuses significant attention on building relationships with pharma and biotech communities to better understand and serve their drug discovery and development needs.    

Recently the field has seen remarkable success with immunotherapies, especially in the area of oncology. This has driven pharma to generate and analyze higher complexity data to understand the immune system and the host-immune response, as they attempt to maximize the value of the information they can get from every clinical trial patient sample. Especially in early phase trials, pharma will run very high complexity technologies on their samples.

Which therapeutic areas is Cytobank mainly focusing on?

Cytobank’s customers main focus is oncology today, but the platform is utilized for infectious disease and other diseases where the immune system plays a role. Technologies enabling us to look at proteins are increasing in terms of capabilities, and we are now able to look more broadly at the immune system and do systems-based immunology work, which is commonly leveraged across multiple therapeutic areas within the pharma industry. Single cell analysis is the most fundamental approach to characterize cellular responses, and the Cytobank platform is the engine behind analyses done for much of the high complexity cytometry single cell research.

What is Cytobank’s strategy in terms of global commercialization?

Today we directly sell and support the U.S. and European markets, and have a few distributors especially in Asia.  Cytobank is a SaaS platform which is easy to commercialize globally, as our users can access the platform from any web enabled device and users do not have to install software. Amazon Web Services, AWS, hosts our platform – the market leading cloud provider – which has the security in place that the pharma industry trusts.

Can you elaborate on Cytobank’s recently announced collaboration with the FDA?

The FDA was using our technology to analyze high complexity cell-based imaging files and approached us for assistance to help with the analysis. One of the key therapies used in immunotherapy today is cell-based therapy, and one of the biggest issues surrounding this therapy is the variability of the manufactured product. The FDA believes that certain phenotypic parameters correlate with function much more strongly than some of the traditional proteins that researchers measure from the cell, and they are using analyses from the Cytobank platform to help support their hypothesis.  This could lead to more effective and reproducible cell-based manufactured products. The FDA is one of the stakeholders for the pharma industry and building our relationship with the FDA could be helpful for Cytobank as we work with our pharma partners.

Could you elaborate on the security aspects of Cytobank’s platform?

Security in the cloud is Cytobank’s number one priority. One of the reasons we use AWS is that it has trusted security procedures and controls in place.  We also use CYBRIC -  a innovative platform that provides real-time security screening of our platform. These systems help us to engineer security into our platform. We are routinely audited by pharma, and data security is something that Cytobank takes very seriously.

What is the current financing and investment climate for Cytobank?

Cytobank has been efficient with its capital and so we have not required much financing. The company is always interested in meeting potential investors that invest in our space, but currently working with strategic partners is our main priority. The company’s recent SBIR grant is helping fund software development, QA, and operations to launch additional functionality to enable not only the discovery of biomarkers in cytometry data, but also add capabilities to analyze single cell RNA-Seq and imaging data.

Soon we will launching a new clustering algorithm – FlowSOM - which will enable the massively scalable processing of up to 90 million different cells at once. This will enable customers to analyze much larger studies, faster.  

What are Cytobank’s key objectives moving forward?

We are in the process of reengineering our platform to prepare for more customers and much larger datasets. We will also add functionality to apply our platform to other data verticals such as imaging and genomics. 

Geographically today most of Cytobank’s business is in the United States and Europe and we see good growth within these two areas. However we will also be looking to expand into other geographies and see significant growth opportunities in China, Japan and India