Editor's Note
Welcome to the first edition of MxW Bulletin, the official newsletter of MaxWell Biosystems. My name is Marie Obien and through MxW Bulletin, I will share with you quarterly updates on new products, application notes, events, corporate development, and trending topics related to electrophysiology instrumentation, neuroscience, drug discovery and safety pharmacology.
More than announcements and promotions, MxW Bulletin's main purpose is to communicate personally with you. I hope you find this issue informative and useful. I will be delighted to hear your feedback and requests for topics that you would like to see covered in the future. Cheers!
Contents:
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Introducing
MaxOne HD-MEA System
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Key Specifications
Electrodes
26,400 platinum electrodes
Size: 3.85×2.10 sq-μm
Pitch: 17.5 μm
Recording
1024 recording channels
20kHz sampling rate, 10 bit
Adjustable gain up to 78 dB
Low noise at 2.4 μVrms
Stimulation
32 stimulation units
Flexible pattern generation
Voltage stim up to ± 1.6 V
Current stimup to ± 1.5 mA
2 nA amplitude resolution
2 μs time resolution
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Power up your electrophysiology experiments with MaxOne, the microelectrode array (MEA) system with the largest sensor area at high-resolution! Made for scientists by scientists, we have built a platform for sub-cellular recording and stimulation of electrogenic cells, such as neurons and cardiomyocytes, in vitro.
Traditionally, MEAs are used to detect population activity from a fraction of cells in the preparation. Thanks to a large sensor area of 3.85×2.10 sq-mm and an electrode density of 3265 electrodes per sq-mm, MaxOne enables unprecedented access to every cell on the array and provides functional readouts of neuronal networks at multiple scales.
To make the most of your experiments, MaxOne comes with MaxLab Live for data acquisition and analysis. We provide extensive Matlab and Python toolboxes for data post-processing, analysis and visualization.
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Want to learn more about MaxOne? We will be traveling throughout Europe, US, and Japan in the next months to attend conferences (see Upcoming Events). Take this opportunity to schedule a meeting with us! We can meet at the conferences or we can arrange a visit to your laboratory.
- London, UK | 26 April
- Paris, France | 27 April
- Milan, Italy | 12 May
- Bordeaux, France | 17-19 May
- Boston, USA | 12-16 June
- Tokyo, Japan | 18-21 July
- Kansai Area, Japan | 25-26 July
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Featured: Urs Frey, CEO of MaxWell Biosystems
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Hi Urs, can you share with us the story of how you founded MaxWell Biosystems?
Urs Frey, CEO of MaxWell Biosystems
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For more than 5 years, we have been developing high-density microelectrode arrays (HD-MEA) for neuroscience applications. Jan Müller and I got really excited about the idea to commercialize our HD-MEA technology when a major scientific paper related to the analysis of an actual medical disease got published in late 2015. The work was a clear demonstration that our MEA technology can advance our understanding of how neuronal circuits work and contribute to better treatments and therapies. In addition, neurons based on human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) started to make their way into cell-based assays, which required better readout technologies. Previously, most scientists and pharmaceutical companies were forced to use animal models. Now we can start using actual human cells and tissues--a truly exciting development!
But even more important was forming a team. When Marie and Michele joined our team, our founders dream team was perfect. With our strong expertise in the technology and the neuroscience applications we were confident that we would be able to successfully launch our startup.
We incorporated the company in September 2016 and launched our first product line MaxOne. We also participated in various startup competitions and mentorships, such as >>venture>>, Venture Kick, CTI Start-up, Venture Leaders, De Vigier, etc. This helped us to focus on the most important business aspects. We are grateful for the experiences and support we received.
As an official ETH-Spinoff we received great support in this initial phase of technology transfer from ETH Zurich, for which we are very thankful.
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What are you most excited about for this year?
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MaxWell Biosystems AG is now hitting the market with our first product line, MaxOne. I am most excited to see how our customers and scientists in the field will perceive our products. We have been working hard on transferring the technology from an academic project to a commercial product and I am really happy with what we have achieved so far. Now I am looking forward to the results our customers will get and to see researchers experience the value that our product brings to their work.
I am also very excited about our current effort on exploring phenotypes in human iPSC-based neuronal cultures. I am confident that we will see progress on this effort, both in our own internal experiments and also together with our customers.
Finally, we are in the middle of our first hiring round. As a very young company, our first hires and student projects will be important in shaping the future of MaxWell Biosystems. I am definitely looking forward onboarding new members to our team.
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MxW Report: R&D, Corporate Dev and Exhibitions
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Human iPSC-derived neurons and cardiomyocytes on MaxOne
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In line with our efforts to develop novel assays for drug discovery and safety pharmacology, we started proof-of-concept tests of recording single cell and network activity from human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived neurons. Using MaxOne. we were able to detect altered electrical activity in a Parkinson's disease neural line compared to a healthy cell line (MyCell DDP DopaNeurons and iCell DopaNeurons, Cellular Dynamics International). Results have been presented in SelectBio: Advances in Drug Discovery - Stem Cells in Drug Discovery Conference in Cambridge, UK. New results will be presented in ISSCR 2017 in Boston, USA on 14-17 June 2017.
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Six conferences and counting
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To bring MaxOne closer to our customers, we already exhibited in six international conferences. We first introduced our HD-MEA system at the 2016 MEA Meeting in Germany (June 2016). From then on, we went to Canada for the Safety Pharmacology Society Meeting (SPS 2016, September 2016), Cambridge, UK for the SelectBio Advances in Drug Discovery Conference (SelectBio 2017, March 2017), and Germany again for the German Physiology Society Meeting (DPG 2017, March 2017). We also attended two conferences near our headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, MipTec 2016 (September 2016) and Translational Opportunities in Stem Cell Research (ISSCR Basel 2017, February 2017). In the next months, we are traveling to UK, France, US, and Japan. See you there!
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Conferences and Exhibitions
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NeuroFrance 2017
17-19 May 2017 | Bordeaux, France
ISSCR 2017
14-17 June 2017 | Boston, USA
The 40th Annual Meeting of the JNS
20-23 July 2017 | Makuhari Messe, Chiba, Japan
ISN 2017
20-24 August 2017 | Paris, France
ERM 2017
5-7 October 2017 | Paris, France
SfN 2017
11-15 November 2017 | Washington, DC, USA
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