Fluidigm Corporation is a public, American company engaged in the design, manufacture and sale of biological research equipment based on integrated fluidic circuit technology. In 2009, Fluidigm was described as "the world's leading manufacturer of microfluidic devices." Among the applications to which Fluidigm products are put to use are protein crystallization, genotyping, DNA analysis and PCR.
Fluidigm was founded in 1999 as "Mycometrix" by Steve Quake and Gajus Worthington. The company was formed to commercialize technology developed by Quake at the California Institute of Technology referred to as microfluidic large-scale integration and "branded" under the name Integrated Fluidic Circuits. As of 2015, Worthington remains with the company as president and chief executive officer, while Quake was a member of the company's scientific advisory board as of 2011. The company completed a successful initial public offering in February 2011, raising about. This followed a failed, IPO in 2008. As of the 2011 IPO, Fluidigm had not yet become profitable, but had accumulated nearly in debt.
Operations
At the end of 2014, Fluidigm had a headcount of 500 personnel. In addition to its headquarters and laboratory facility in South San Francisco, California, which it expanded in 2014, the company in 2005 established the first biochip manufacturing facility in Singapore. The Singapore facility was in 2009 led by Grace Yow, who also held the position of Fluidigm vice president of worldwide manufacturing.
Products
Fluidigm's products typically consist of single-use biochips, instrumentation for handling biochips and software for instrument operation and data collection and analysis. No Fluidigm products had been approved for clinical use in the United States as of 2009. Fluidigm's first commercial product was aimed at the protein crystallization market and was launched in 2003 under the brand "Topaz". The company's second marketed product targeted high-throughput DNA amplification and was launched in 2006 under the brand "BioMark". By 2013, BioMark had been adapted to real-time PCR and was capable of running >9000 reactions in parallel. A high-throughput genotyping system, FLUIDIGM EPI, was introduced in 2008. The C1 Single-Cell Auto Prep, or C1 system, was released in the early 2000s aimed at delivering 96 single-cell capture and processing events in parallel. One aim of development forward from the C1 system is increasing parallel throughput. This initial line of instruments purportedly cost about apiece to purchase in 2011. One reported use for the instruments is "to identify signatures of induced pluripotent stem cells". In June 2015, Fluidigm introduced Helios™, the third-generation CyTOF® platform that enables system-level biology at single-cell resolution, on an accessible, expandable system designed for clinical trials. CyTOF technology provides a high-resolution proteomic profile of each cell, which distinguishes it from all other cells and reveals the heterogeneity of the sample. Fluidigm also announced proteomics sample barcoding, which enables Helios and all other CyTOF customers to take advantage of multiplexing in their experimental design.
