National Health Research Institutes (NHRI) of Taiwan is pleased to announce the licensing and transfer of two outstanding technologies — “A Microfluidic Dual-well Device for High-throughput Single-cell Capture and Culture” and “Selective Particle Transfer from One Device to Another” — to OriGem Biotech of Taiwan. The transfer of the intellectual property behind these was made official with a signing ceremony today at the Ministry of Health and Welfare in Taipei. This achievement helps reconfirm NHRI’s essential role in Taiwan’s biomedicine sector.

These two technologies were developed by a team led by Dr. Chia-Hsien Hsu of NHRI’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Nanomedicine. The related lines of research began in 2012 after Dr. Hsu noticed problems with monoclone culture for antibody therapy. To improve the situation, Dr. Hsu’s team designed a highly efficient cell-manipulation technique that can be used to capture single cells and subsequently culture them into monoclonal cell groups. This important finding not only was published as the cover story of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal Lab on a Chip in 2015 but received the National Innovation Award in 2018. By using a combination of the microfluidic dual-well device and the selective particle transfer method developed later, researchers can manipulate and culture single cells highly efficiently without expensive machines or repetitive manual operations.

OriGem Biotech is founded in 2016 that focuses on microfluidic chips for biomedicine. Since 2016, NHRI and OriGem Biotech have cooperated with each other on many projects and developed a strong working relationship.

      Successful biomedical technology transfers such as these are made possible by the government’s promotion policies and leadership of the Ministry of Health and Welfare.