Bracco enters cell therapy manufacturing space, touts microbubble tech

Bracco Imaging, a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Milan, Italy, is expanding into the cell therapy sector with a new lipid-based microbubble technology designed to simplify upstream cell selection and activation steps.

The company said the bead-free approach is intended as an alternative to traditional magnetic bead methods for cell enrichment and activation, with the goal of supporting faster and more scalable cell therapy manufacturing. The microbubble technology is designed to support both positive- and negative-selection strategies and can be run sequentially for multi-step enrichment workflows, according to the announcement.

“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,” Sophie He, vice president of cell therapy and head of M&A and partnering at Bracco Imaging, said in a statement. “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 said it will work with technology developers, academic groups, and process development teams at cell therapy companies to evaluate the performance of the platform across multiple use cases.

The company noted ongoing partnerships including a collaboration with CellBri to co-develop a closed cell selection system. Bracco is also working with Limula, a life science tools company, and researchers at the University of Fribourg to develop an automated alternative to magnetic bead-based cell selection and activation.

In a November 2025 update, Bracco said the Limula collaboration combines its lipid-based microbubble technology with Limula’s automated cell processing platform to create a traceless cell selection approach intended to simplify quality control and improve yields, according to the companies. The project also involves research led by a T-cell metabolism expert at the University of Fribourg, the companies said.