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Vladimir GAUTHIER is national winner of the PEPITE competition for young creators of innovative companies

Entrepreneurial PhD at FEMTO-ST, Vladimir Gauthier is developing a company project on the microrobotic sorting of biological cells, which has received national price !

Created in 2014, the PEPITE Prize was created by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation to encourage entrepreneurship among young people in higher education, to strengthen support for the creation of innovative companies and to better support the development of projects that emerge with the support of PEPITE. In 2019, Bpifrance is a partner in this initiative and is co-organizing the Prize.

Selected as the national winner of PEPITE, representative of the Burgundy-Franche-Comté region, Vladimir Gauthier brilliantly put forward his "Cell-Select" business creation project during the BIG (BPI Inno Generation) event organized by Bpifrance on Thursday, October 10 in Paris. Currently post-doctoral fellow and entrepreneur, Vladimir Gauthier is preparing to create his start-up within FEMTO-ST Institute where he has developed a microrobotic technological tool to greatly improve the quality of continuous flow cell sorting.

This new technology offers an innovative system for selecting and isolating target immune cells, lymphocytes (white blood cells), which are capable of attacking tumor cells after being cultured and re-injected into the patient. However, these lymphocytes are rare in a blood sample and their rapid and accurate sorting is necessary so that physicians can optimize immunotherapy treatments to effectively fight cancer. The micro robot developed by "CellSelect" will thus make it possible to sort 1 million cells per hour with a degree of precision never before achieved.