Cell therapy manufacturing · Non-viral delivery
Indee Labs
A Berkeley company that built a chip the size of a fingernail to push gene editing cargo into immune cells without a virus and without an electric shock. In March 2026 the whole patent portfolio was offered to the market through a broker.
Thirty million cells in ten seconds
The part that does the work is smaller than a stick of gum. Five millimetres by ten. Inside sits an array of tiny posts, and when a suspension of human T cells is driven past them at about eight to ten times atmospheric pressure, the flow breaks into vortices. The vortices tug at the cell membranes and open them for an instant, long enough for whatever is in the fluid to slip inside.
“Our tiny 5-by-10-millimeter chip, which is about the size of your pinky nail, can process 30 million cells in less than 10 seconds,” the founder, Ryan Pawell, told an interviewer in 2020.
The technique has a name, microfluidic vortex shedding, and the company shortened it to hydroporation. No virus carries the cargo. No electrode zaps the cell. The physics does the opening, and the cell closes itself again.
The step everyone else does badly
A CAR-T therapy is made by taking a patient’s own T cells, inserting a gene that teaches them to recognise a tumour, growing them up and putting them back. The insertion is the bottleneck. The standard methods are a modified virus, which lands the gene at random and needs years and a specialised facility to produce, and electroporation, which pulses the cells with electricity and leaves many of them damaged.
“The first generation of gene therapies will cost about the same as a house in Sydney or Melbourne because the manufacturing process, which typically use engineered viruses, is slow, difficult and problematic,” said Warren McKenzie, chief executive of the Australian arm, in 2018. Time is the other cost. “Patients can die in the time that it takes to manufacture these immunotherapies,” Pawell said the same year.
Others saw the same gap. A 2024 merger proxy filed with the SEC by SQZ Biotechnologies, which had its own mechanical delivery platform, named the field: “We also compete with companies who engineer cells using microfluidic mechanoporation or similar non-viral cell delivery technology, including Basilard BioTech, CellFE, Indee Labs, Kytopen, MxT Biotech, Portal Therapeutics and Navan Technologies.” That proxy was the shareholder vote that liquidated SQZ and sold more than 400 of its patents to Stemcell Technologies for $11.8 million.
A surfing trip that lasted five years
Pawell took a mechanical engineering degree at UC Santa Barbara, then flew to Australia for a couple of weeks of surfing and stayed about five years for a microfluidics PhD. Near the end he was accepted into a New South Wales health department course on commercialising medical devices, the only student among professors and postdocs. IndieBio then gave him roughly 30 days to move from Sydney to San Francisco.
In 2016 the company had two full time employees, eight advisers and a co-founder named Matt who handled biology and business development. The later record carries other names: Amy Twite as chief scientific officer, Justin Jarrell as head of research and principal investigator on two NIH awards, and McKenzie running the Australian entity while chips were fabricated at the Australian National Fabrication Facility in South Australia.
Grants first, then a product
The money arrived in the pattern common to hardware with a long development arc. A US$1.3M angel round from Y Combinator and individuals. Then in April 2018 a grant of close to A$1M from the Australian government BioMedTech Horizons program, announced by the health minister. Then in May 2018 a US$2.6M round led by Founders Fund’s FF Science with Main Sequence Ventures, the fund built on the CSIRO Innovation Fund.
The federal money that followed was American. Five NIH awards between FY2020 and FY2023 total $3,304,505, the largest a National Cancer Institute contract of $1,999,646 to scale the platform with Justin Eyquem’s laboratory at UC San Francisco. A separate award put Hydropore in Leonardo Ferreira’s regulatory T cell laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina.
Commercially, 2021 to 2023 was the busy stretch: an early access program the company said included three of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies, Stanford’s Cell Therapy Clinic and Moffitt Cancer Center; a DNA knock in collaboration with GenScript; exclusive China distribution with Sunko Instruments; and in April 2023 a strategic investment from BroadOak’s BioTools Venture Fund, the first out of that fund.
Then the newsroom went quiet
The company’s PR Newswire page carries no release after the Sunko announcement of May 25, 2023. The peer reviewed capstone arrived anyway. In February 2025 Scientific Reports published the scaled study, with authors from Indee, UCSF, MUSC and Baylor, reporting higher CAR-T yields than electroporation and a run of 500 million cells in under ten seconds.
Thirteen months later, on March 31, 2026, a patent brokerage announced the portfolio was for sale. “This portfolio gives acquirers immediate IP defensibility and a direct pathway to productization in both the research and therapeutic manufacturing markets,” said Dean Becker, chairman of Becker Transactions. The release put the installed base at more than 20 instruments and more than 1,600 chips sold.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Peer reviewed performance | Scientific Reports, Feb 17, 2025: “Hydroporation resulted in 1.7- to 2-fold higher CAR-T yields compared to electroporation with superior cell viability and recovery.” Indee employees and equity holders are among the authors, disclosed in the competing interests statement. | Public record |
| Federal funding | Five NIH awards to INDEE, INC totalling $3,304,505: NCI contracts of $399,299 and $1,999,646, NIAID $300,000, NIDDK $309,636, NIGMS $295,924. Last recorded project end date Sep 5, 2025. | Public record |
| Patents | Three granted US patents in the family, US11052394B2, US11465147B2 and US12030052B2, are assigned on the record to Indee. Pty. Ltd., the Australian entity, not the US company. The 2026 release claims “over 20 U.S. and international patents and patents pending”. | Public record |
| Customers | Three of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies, unnamed, plus Stanford and Moffitt in 2021. More than 20 instruments and more than 1,600 chips sold, per the 2026 release. No customer named, no revenue published. | Company-stated |
| Head to head superiority | The 2026 release states that “Early access deployments have already demonstrated superior performance to market leaders such as Lonza’s Nucleofector and Thermo Fisher’s Neon systems”. No published head to head study against either system was found. | Company-stated |
| Clinical use | No FDA 510(k) or PMA record and no registered trial in the records pulled for this profile. Hydropore is sold for research use only. | Not found |
| Operating status | The website still invites orders and says the team is actively growing. The newsroom shows nothing after May 2023 and the patents are being marketed by a broker. | Site differs from the 2026 release |
Read plainly: the physics works and the data survived peer review at scale, paid for in large part by the US taxpayer. What never arrived was the commercial proof, a named customer, a revenue number, a clinical partner carrying the chip into a manufacturing suite. A portfolio offered through a broker is what a company does when the technology is worth more than the operating business.
What to watch
- Whether the portfolio finds a buyer, and whether it follows the SQZ pattern of an instrument maker acquiring a mechanoporation platform outright.
- Which entity signs. The granted US patents name Indee. Pty. Ltd., while the NIH awards were made to INDEE, INC.
- Any first appearance of a Form D on EDGAR, which would show a late financing rather than an asset sale.
In their words
“Indee is solving scalable gene delivery. This is really important for gene therapy since right now scales are limited to just a few thousand wealthy patients per year.”
Ryan Pawell, founder and CEO, IndieBio interview, 2016 · Interview
“Our tiny 5-by-10-millimeter chip, which is about the size of your pinky nail, can process 30 million cells in less than 10 seconds.”
Ryan Pawell, Synthego interview, 2020 · Interview
“Patients can die in the time that it takes to manufacture these immunotherapies”
Ryan Pawell, seed funding announcement, 2018 · Company release
“The first generation of gene therapies will cost about the same as a house in Sydney or Melbourne because the manufacturing process, which typically use engineered viruses, is slow, difficult and problematic,”
Warren McKenzie, CEO, Indee Labs Australia, April 2018 · Company release
“We expect Indee Labs will become the standard platform for bedside cell therapy,”
Aaron VanDevender, chief scientist and principal, Founders Fund, May 2018 · Investor
“The Hydropore can be a game changer for our preclinical and future clinical research.”
Leonardo Ferreira, PhD, MUSC Hollings Cancer Center, August 2022 · Academic
“This portfolio gives acquirers immediate IP defensibility and a direct pathway to productization in both the research and therapeutic manufacturing markets.”
Dean Becker, chairman, Becker Transactions, March 2026 · Broker release
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordNIH RePORTER, five awards to INDEE, INC
- Public recordScalable intracellular delivery via microfluidic vortex shedding enhances the function of CAR T-cells
- Public recordWO2016109864A1, WO2019084624A1 and family members US11052394B2, US11465147B2, US12030052B2
- Public recordSQZ Biotechnologies merger proxy naming mechanoporation competitors
- IndependentSQZ opts for liquidation and $11.8M asset fire sale to Stemcell
- IndependentIndee Labs Closes $2.6M in Seed Funding From Founders Fund’s FF Science and Main Sequence Ventures
- IndependentMUSC immunology researcher receives SBIR grant to push boundaries of regulatory T-cell therapy
- InterviewRyan Pawell Talks About Indee Labs’ CRISPR Delivery Technology
- InterviewUnlocking Gene Therapy for the Masses: an interview with Ryan Pawell of Indee
- CompanyIndee Labs receives funding to develop gene therapy manufacturing technology in Australia
- CompanyIndee Labs website, home, technology, publications, media and careers pages
- BrokerBecker Transactions Announces Global Patent Portfolio Defining Future of Engineered Cell Therapy Manufacturing
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
