NewHavenBIZ

8 n e w h a v e n B I Z | N o v e m b e r 2 0 2 1 | n e w h a v e n b i z . c o m O n T h e R e c o r d | Q & A What does your company do exactly? We have a chip technology that works on this IsoLight instrument system. What our systems do is they are able to detect these small subsets of human cells in our body that are superhero cells. ese superhero cells create these really highly active responses. ey are important for fighting disease. Are you dealing with blood samples, tissue samples? All of the above. e majority of the work we do is taking information from blood sam- ples. We are then using that to teach our customers. Our customers are le- veraging our technology to learn about how these subsets of superhero cells from the blood can create longer-term responses to cancer. [Applications include] creating a better therapeutic that lasts longer. [In clinical trials] you are finding patient populations who have a high degree of immune health, and a high degree of response to the therapeutic. at becomes really important for precision medicine, identifying patients who respond very well to a therapy against a disease. Who are your customers? We are really selling to the top 15 pharmaceutical companies, that is one part of our customer base. It is emerg- ing biotechnology companies — peo- ple trying to leverage new biotech to advance new medicines. And academic medical centers. ey are doing the most cutting-edge work, with the most cutting-edge clinical trials. We are a research-use only system, so they are really advancing biomarker immune cell research, but that research is really informing how to take that next step and develop a more precise therapeutic that has long-term re- sponses. What was your reaction to the company going public in October? is has been a journey. We spun out of Yale, and we had some contributions from Caltech as well. We built our tech and our company really out of a small Branford-based lab. Today, we are at this place where we have hundreds of folks working for the company, all working hard on a goal to deliver to our customers this unique technology that leverages superhero cells to better understand earlier sourc- es of how we create better, advanced medicines, against things like cancer and infectious disease. We are pretty excited about it. What prompted you to found the company? I had been working in and around a number of different types of healthcare and life sciences companies in the past. I met the professors who invented this technology, co-inventors out of Yale and Caltech. I think I was inspired by this idea that you could leverage new biology and harness it to better understand how to use our immune system to fight cancers. Our idea was that we could really build this up into a large, high-impact, high-value company. It was inspired by these customers developing new ther- apeutics at the time, which were very early in the process. We believed that they were going to work. How is your technology different? It is these interesting and highly rel- evant superhero cells. Typically when you are using another technology, you can't see these superhero cells, because you just aren't able to isolate the cells. In these single cell chambers, we Searching for Superhero Cells By Michelle Tuccitto Sullo Sean Mackay CEO and Co-Founder IsoPlexis Age: 38 Education: B.S., Economics, The Wharton School; MBA, Yale School of Management PHOTOS | COURTESY ISOPLEXIS IsoPlexis leverages new tech to fight diseases IsoPlexis' IsoSpark instrument I t has been a time of growth for life science technology company IsoPlexis Corp. e Yale spinout, headquartered at 35 NE Industrial Road in Branford, had its initial public offering in October and raised some $125 million. Last January, the company raised $135 million in a Series D round, with much of it going toward its ongoing expansion. Since its commercial launch in 2018, IsoPlexis says its products have been ad- opted by researchers worldwide, including the top 15 biopharmaceutical compa- nies by revenue, and about half of the nation's comprehensive cancer centers. e company's technology can help with the development of personalized treat- ments for patients suffering from diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders. IsoPlexis' platform includes instruments and soware. e technology captures sin- gle cell protein information then interprets the data for the development of advanced medicines, therapies and vaccines. Researchers can analyze individual cells and the proteins they secrete to determine how patients will respond to therapies. e company has also been involved in study- ing COVID-19 and how it interacts with the immune system. Originally founded in 2013, today the company has grown to include approximate- ly 300 employees. CEO Sean Mackay co-founded the company with Rong Fan, a professor of biomed- ical engineering at Yale University. Its technology comes from the labs of both Fan and James R. Heath, a chemistry professor at Caltech who serves on IsoPlexis' board. New Haven Biz recently chatted with Mackay about IsoPlexis' technology, future and potential impact in the fight against devastating and deadly illnesses. Sean Mackay, CEO and co-founder, IsoPlexis

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