As microfluidics continue to gain ground as a critical enabler of single-cell research and therapeutic development, companies at the forefront of the field are evolving to meet growing demand for scalable, integrated solutions.

Drug Discovery News spoke with Dale Levitzke, CEO of Sphere Bio, to learn how the company’s latest advances in microfluidic technology are unlocking new applications, from high-throughput antibody discovery to complex functional assays, and what this means for the future of life science innovation.

Sphere Bio recently rebranded from Sphere Fluidics. What does this signify about the company’s direction and future?

The name change marks a significant milestone in the company’s development, reflecting our transition from a leading innovator of droplet-based microfluidics to an established commercial provider of integrated life sciences tools and solutions.

This transition reflects growing global demand for the company’s single cell analysis and isolation technologies, including the flagship Cyto-Mine® platform, which has become the industry-leading system, and recently launched next generation Cyto-Mine Chroma platform, alongside new assays to support an increasing range of biotherapeutic applications.

With a stronger commercial footprint and a broader product portfolio, Sphere Bio is moving beyond its engineering roots to establish itself as a fully integrated, commercially driven life science tools company. But our mission stays the same: leveraging our expertise in single cell analysis to provide researchers with the cutting edge tools and solutions they need to accelerate scientific discovery.

How does your picodroplet technology differ from traditional droplet microfluidics, and what advantages does this offer?

At the core of our platforms is proprietary picodroplet technology, which are used to encapsulate a cell. These are tiny droplets of aqueous fluid in an oil carrier fluid (a ‘single emulsion’) or an aqueous core surrounded by an oil shell in an aqueous carrier fluid (a ‘double emulsion’). The chemistry of the emulsions is carefully designed to create long-term stable, biocompatible microenvironments with minimal molecular leakage, even for small molecules like metabolites. Each droplet effectively functions as an ultra-miniaturized, isolated test tube containing media, reagents, and a single cell, enabling high-throughput experiments at single cell resolution.

Leveraging this picodroplet technology, Cyto-Mine is the only droplet microfluidic platform that integrates the following steps into a single run: cell-encapsulation, incubation, fluorescence-based sorting, and single-cell dispensing with monoclonality assurance.

Cyto-Mine is a turn-key solution that reduces months of work with traditional methods to days. It is very easy to use and doesn’t require highly specialized personnel. This means that users can easily add Cyto-Mine to their antibody discovery or cell line development workflows and benefit from reduced project cost and timelines as well as better antibodies/cells selected for downstream development.

What are the most significant innovations in your microfluidics platform within the last year?

In the past year, we’ve introduced Cyto-Mine® Chroma, a next-generation instrument that integrates our proprietary picodroplet technology with advanced fluorescence multiplexing, image-based cell analysis, and novel single cell functional assays. This innovation moves beyond single marker detection to multiplexed readouts, allowing simultaneous measurement of antibody secretion, cell viability, binding specificity, and both surface and intracellular markers, all within a single workflow.

It also opens the door to analysing more complex molecules, such as bispecific antibodies and antibody-drug conjugates, with greater resolution. In parallel, we’ve advanced the platform’s automation and data integration capabilities, making it easier to implement in existing laboratory workflows while generating richer, more actionable insights for biotherapeutic discovery and development.

How are you enabling more complex functional assays, such as cell–cell interactions or gene editing efficacy?

We’re expanding our droplet technology to support co-encapsulation of multiple cell types, enabling assays that mimic the complexity of in vivo environments, ideal for studying cell–cell interactions, immune synapse formation, and engineered cell function. Our team is developing enhancements that will make these workflows even more efficient and accessible for a broader range of applications. In fact, we plan to launch a new module for Cyto-Mine in the first half of 2026 that will significantly boost the performance of these assays.

We’re also collaborating with partners to adapt our systems for CRISPR screening and gene editing validation, using our droplets to isolate rare edited cells, rapidly assess function, and enrich the most promising candidates for further development.

Can you share specific examples of how your solutions are accelerating biologics discovery or cell therapy development?

One biopharma partner used our technology to screen and isolate high-producing, stable antibody-secreting clones in a fraction of the time it would’ve taken using traditional limiting dilution or flow sorters. This reduced their cell line development timeline to 10 weeks, down from 26 weeks with traditional methods.

Not only does Cyto-Mine dramatically reduce cost and timelines for antibody discovery and cell line development projects, it can have a significant impact on downstream processes as well. For example, Cyto-Mine enables orders of magnitude more cells to be screened, allowing researchers to select clones with higher productivity. This upstream improvement translates to substantial downstream benefits, including an estimated 20 percent reduction in manufacturing costs by selecting clones that are over 25 percent more productive.

In cell therapy, our droplet-based approach is enabling innovators to isolate functional CAR-T cells based on cytokine secretion and target killing activity, rather than relying solely on surface marker expression. This is a critical step toward developing more predictive potency assays and ultimately improving patient outcomes.

What excites you most about the future of microfluidics in life sciences?

Microfluidics is shifting from a niche enabler to a central pillar in life sciences innovation. What excites me is the convergence of this field with high content analytics, automation, and artificial intelligence.

We’re moving toward a future where we can profile each cell as an individual data point, not just as part of a population, and make real-time decisions that accelerate discovery, reduce failure rates, and unlock therapies we previously couldn’t reach. We can also generate data sets at unprecedented scale to train AI models used in protein engineering.  

Looking ahead, how do you see the synergy between microfluidics and machine learning evolving?

Machine learning and microfluidics are a natural match. Our systems generate massive volumes of high-dimensional single cell data—imaging, fluorescence, secretion profiles—and machine learning is the key to unlocking patterns we’d never spot manually. We currently use these algorithms for monoclonality assessment and will build on this to increase the functionality of the Cyto-Mine platform.

What is really exciting in this space is our unique ability to generate vast, multiplex profiles of live single cells. This will enable our customers and partners to build AI algorithms that predict antibody structure and function which will further reduce development timelines for new therapeutics.

Are there any emerging research areas or customer challenges that you believe Sphere Bio is uniquely positioned to address, but haven’t yet been fully explored?

The cell-cell co-encapsulation module that I mentioned earlier opens up many new applications that we have only just begun to explore. This will enable us to encapsulate two or more cells (or beads) into a picodroplet in pre-defined combinations. The most obvious application of this is to put two types of cells together and observe their interaction. For example, encapsulating a tumor cell and T-cell to identify the best T-cell receptors.  

When our customers learn about this capability and the flexibility it offers, it really stimulates their imagination in identifying new ways that it could be used to advance their work. Certainly, powerful new applications will emerge from our work with customers on this front.