Expansify™ Innovation Awards

INTRODUCTION: The efficient production of high-quality mammalian cells remains a bottleneck, limiting productivity across the biomedical R&D landscape, from basic research to translational sciences and therapeutics development. XDemics Corporation, a Caltech spin-out, has addressed this challenge with the launch of Expansify™ laboratory cultureware.  Expansify™ delivers tissue-level oxygenation to expanding cells, enabling them to approach theoretical cell density limits, achieving up to 100 times higher densities than conventional cultureware, in a low-stress, shear free manner (Fig 1).  With Expansify™, researchers and manufacturers can produce substantially greater quantities of high-quality, viable cells and their products, while using less space and time. This translates into enhanced product quality and reproducibility with sharply reduced costs, and faster discovery & production cycles.

BACKGROUND. Expansify™ cultureware is constructed from oxygen-permeable material and precision molded as a series of ridges and open grooves (Fig 2),  Each ridge functions as a synthetic capillary, optimized for efficient oxygen exchange from the atmosphere (kLa > 60/hr), while each open groove provides an ideal replicative niche engineered to support maximal cell expansion in a shear-free manner.    This precise geometry is preserved across the product family, ensuring cells experience an identical microenvironment independent of culture scale.  Thus, Expansify™ is inherently linearly scalable from 96-well plates for R&D to stackable cartridges for clinical and commercial production. Monoclonal antibody, AAV, stem cell, and CAR-T products have been successfully produced in Expansify™ across a range of adherent, suspension, microcarrier, and spheroid formats.

EXPANSIFY INNOVATION AWARDS: We are pleased to announce the availability of one-time awards of up to $10,000 in total to support the implementation of Expansify™ products across a wide range of scientific applications. Awards will be provided to the most innovative proposals outlining evaluation of Expansify™ cultureware for production of high-quality therapeutic modalities such as mAbs, immune cells, stem cells, and gene therapies, while also evaluating the enablement of use cases in HTS, HT production and 3D culture, including organoid production.

INNOVATION AWARD TIERS: Winners will receive tiered awards covering direct costs, Expansify™ devices, and conference travel for accepted abstracts, plus $500 bonus for best photo.

DEADLINES: Grants will be reviewed on a rolling, first come first served basis between October 1 and Dec 30, 2025.

DURATION: Experiments should be completed and shared with XDemics within 3 months of disbursement.

PROPOSAL: Prepare a brief, non-confidential proposal (2-page limit) for a pilot study with Expansify™, including:

  • Application: Describe the application or problem that is being addressed. Examples: adapting for an existing protocol, substituting for polystyrene flatware/shaker flasks, enabling high throughput screening through greater yield/well, scaling a complex biologic, differentiating or expanding challenging cell types, enabling 3D culture, characterizing process yields for biomanufacturing.
  • Significance / Impact of Use Case: Describe how you foresee the Expansify™ technology impacting the application. What would this enable at the level of the scientist, laboratory, and/or field?
  • Proposed Experiment(s): Briefly describe the well-controlled experimental plan to be completed with 3 months. ‍
  • Success Criteria, Deliverables: Describe metrics for success (e.g. cost savings, throughput, potency) and the planned deliverables (e.g. research report, images, data).

SUBMISSION: Grant applications should be submitted to grants@xdemics.com along with CV/biosketch.