Bracco Imaging, a global pharmaceutical company that develops, manufactures, and markets healthcare solutions, is expanding into the cell therapy space to explore new applications of its long-established microbubble technology.

Bracco’s new lipid-based microbubble product 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. 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 new application of their robust microbubble technology across a range of use cases.

“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,” said Fulvio Renoldi Bracco, CEO of Bracco Imaging SpA. “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,” said 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.”

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. This flexibility is aimed at helping developers isolate harder-to-purify cell subsets.

Designed as an open, integration-ready platform, this technology is compatible with automated and closed manufacturing systems and is expected to be available for clinical use in 2027.