Officials at Bracco say the company is expanding into the cell therapy space using its expertise with its microbubble technology. Bracco’s new lipid-based microbubble technology is designed to simplify key upstream steps in cell therapy manufacturing, offering a bead-free alternative to traditional magnetic bead approaches for cell enrichment and activation, explains CEO Fulvio Renoldi Bracco, CEO, Bracco Imaging.
Bracco will be engaging with technology developers, academic and translational research groups, and process development teams at cell therapy companies to evaluate the performance of this novel application of its microbubble technology across a range of use cases, he adds.
Cell selection remains a critical but often constraining step in cell therapy development, particularly as programs move beyond standard CD3 enrichment and toward more complex or rarer cell populations. Despite common usage, in the opinion of a number of bioprocessors, conventional magnetic bead-based methods are known to introduce workflow complexity, impose quality and regulatory challenges, and limit flexibility in downstream processing, maintains a Bracco spokesperson.
“After more than two decades of use in diagnostic imaging, we recognized that Bracco’s microbubble technology has applications that will make cell therapy manufacturing faster, more affordable, and ubiquitous,” he continues. “We aim to give developers of both cell therapies and supporting manufacturing platforms a cleaner, scalable option for cell selection that can expand what’s possible beyond standard CD3+ selection workflows.”
“Therapeutics developers have told us that today’s standard, simple enrichment, falls short of their needs for precise cellular orchestration, creating an obstacle to scaling manufacturing,” says Sophie He, vice president of cell therapy and head of M&A and partnering at Bracco Imaging.
“We are introducing a ‘zero-footprint’ technology where the separation vector simply dissolves, allowing us to isolate highly specific cell populations without the cellular stress or residual contamination that currently cause bottlenecks. By ensuring intracellular signaling pathways remain unperturbed, we are providing therapeutic teams the clean biological canvas necessary to engineer the next generation of curative medicines.”
Supports positive- and negative-selection strategies
Bracco’s cell selection and activation microbubble technology is designed to support both positive- and negative-selection strategies and can be run sequentially to enable multi-step enrichment workflows, according to Renoldi Bracco, who points out that this flexibility is aimed at helping developers isolate harder-to-purify cell subsets.
Unlike bead-based approaches, Bracco’s cell selection and activation microbubble technology can be removed simply by popping them or leaving them undisturbed for a short period of time, says a company spokesperson, who also adds that the “company’s goal is to support integration into development workflows and, over time, inclusion in clinical programs as manufacturing processes advance toward later-stage trials.”
The company has established a dedicated team focused on partnerships, technology evaluation, and platform development. Bracco’s partners in the space include CellBri to codevelop a flexible, closed cell selection system, as well as Limula and experts from University of Fribourg to develop an automated alternative to conventional magnetic bead-based cell selection and activation for cell therapy manufacturing. The company will share more later this year as early access partners help demonstrate the capabilities of this technology.
Bracco will introduce their microbubble technology at Advanced Therapies Week 2026 in San Diego. The Bracco team will be based at Innovation Zone Stand P6. A company presentation, “Using Universal Microbubbles to Optimize T-cell Selection and Activation,” will take in the Innovation Zone on Tuesday Feb. 10 from 1:00–1:15 p.m., where Bracco will present their latest data on cell selection and activation, along with its potential applications across the cell therapy workflow.
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