CellAlign™

CellAlign™ is another platform technology designed to utilize NanoShrink™. CellAlign™ allows for the structured alignment of biological tissues, particularly tissues which naturally grow in a linear fashion (like cardiac or nerve tissue). CellAlign’s key feature is a micro-fabricated substrate with non-periodic (or random) linear patterned grooves that allow for the alignment of cells along a single axis. This alignment condition is paramount for many cellular processes and is most physiologically relevant to biological tissue.

CellAlign™ takes advantage of the Company’s unique ability to fabricate intricate microstructures to provide a growth substrate that allows for uniformly aligned cardiac cells. Shrink is developing the CellAlign™ prototype and additional research is required to fully characterize the CellAlign™ applications. Current research is focused on cardiac cell implantation of tissue grown on CellAlign™. Shrink’s ability to produce chips has been demonstrated in the lab environment and it will continue additional beta testing efforts.

In the future, Shrink hopes to design therapeutic linear tissue stem cells “band-aids” with CellAlign™ in order to provide novel personalized stem cell therapies to solve some of the world’s most perplexing health maladies.

One such potential use for CellAlign™ is the creation of “heart patches” for the treatment of damaged heart tissue during cardiac infarction. Cardiac stem cells grown on known substrates position themselves naturally based on random distribution, and ultimately, the propagation of electrical biological signal is severely degraded; these cells are weak, rarely grow and often just die. In animal models, cardiac cells grown on CellAlign™ take a specific orientation, allowing for electrical propagation and a visual “beating” characteristic. It is our goal to one day provide for human cardiac cells to grow on CellAlign™ and to thereby obtain the necessary orientation or alignment for transplantation, thereby increasing the odds of tissue incorporation for minimally invasive cardiac stem cell therapies.