NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Xcell Biosciences said today that it has signed agreements with two new international distributors — Cambridge Bioscience in the UK, and BioStream in Japan.
Xcell's Avatar system is a platform for culturing and propagating a variety of cell types in an in vivo-like environment by controlling key physiological conditions such as pressure, oxygen, temperature, and CO2 levels. The company says that this can help researchers generate results that exhibit the true phenotypic, genomic and proteomic characteristics of a native sample, yielding more accurate and relevant results from downstream molecular analyses than traditional cell culture methods.
Cambridge Bioscience will be the exclusive distributor for the Avatar platform in the UK. Xcell said that it has already seen multiple system sales to date there, including to Cancer Research UK where the Carlos Caldas lab is using Avatar in functional genomics studies of breast cancer.
In Japan, BioStream will supply users with the Xcell's full line of products. Kyushu University researcher Koichi Akashi is already employing Avatar in immunology, hematology and cancer stem cell studies, the company said.
"We’re excited to work with our new distributors overseas and to add distributors in additional markets as we grow our sales and extend the reach of our innovative technology to more labs around the world," Xcell CEO Brian Feth said in a statement, adding that the company has seen "significant customer demand since starting the Avatar system early access program in March."