About This Webinar
The analysis of cells for research and diagnostic applications continues to create demand for improvements—in performance, but also in ease of use and total cost of ownership. Flow cytometry routinely delivers high-throughput cell counting and identification, but it suffers from several unresolved bottleneck, such as: (i) spectral spillover, requiring burdensome compensation protocols; and (ii) high autofluorescence background, which reduces assay sensitivity. Time-Resolved Flow Cytometry (TRFC) is a new suite of technologies that addresses these and other issues. By capturing fluorescence information in the time domain as well as in the wavelength domain, TRFC allows the discrimination of fluorophores with completely overlapping spectra. Using TRFC we have demonstrated compensation-free flow cytometry, which drastically simplifies the user experience; and autofluorescence-free flow cytometry, which increases the sensitivity of cell assays. In addition, by exploiting a new dimension of measurement, TRFC paves the way for fluorescence-based multiplexing to 40 colors and beyond.
***This presentation premiered during the 2022
BioPhotonics Conference. For more information on Photonics Media conferences, visit
events.photonics.com.
About the presenter
Giacomo Vacca, Ph.D., earned bachelor's and master's degrees in physics from Harvard University and a doctorate degree in physics from Stanford University. For his dissertation, Vacca worked with Nobel Prize-winner Bob Laughlin to develop a novel ultrafast light-scattering technique. He has set up entire laboratories from scratch, started and led development programs, and generated intellectual property, with 102 patent applications and 61 patents issued to date. He has also led diverse interdisciplinary groups and managed intellectual property portfolios.
At Abbott Labs, Vacca invented and developed laser rastering, a radically innovative concept in flow cytometry that increased the rate of cell analysis by a factor of 30. In 2010, Vacca founded Kinetic River, a biophotonics design and product development company focused on flow cytometry. Since 2017, Kinetic River has been awarded four competitive Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), totaling about $2.2 million, to help develop innovative flow cytometry technologies. Kinetic River's customers include the National Cancer Institute at the NIH and Italy's National Research Council. In 2013, Vacca co-founded BeamWise, a provider of optical system design tools. He is a senior member of SPIE and Optica (formerly OSA) and a past Abbott Research Fellow.