Blog

Portal Bio's March 2026 newsletter is live, featuring five new experimental datasets across immune cell engineering, live-cell drug discovery assays, and high-throughput automated screening. Each experiment demonstrates a workflow that conventional electroporation and lipid nanoparticle methods cannot reliably replicate in primary immune cells.

Portal delivers circular RNA (circRNA) directly into cells, enabling protein expression lasting up to 10 days and simultaneous co-delivery of multiple constructs in a single step. In collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital, circRNA-engineered CAR-T cells achieved 75+% dual positive co-expression of CD19 CAR and membrane-bound IL-12, with 95% tumor cell cytotoxicity at a 3:1 effector-to-target ratio.

Portal delivered GFP circular RNA (circRNA) and a fluorescent tracer into primary human neutrophils directly in unfractionated whole blood, with no upstream isolation step. Boosted samples reached ~50% GFP+ neutrophils the day after delivery and ~32% to ~44% dextran+ neutrophils the same day, while preserving the neutrophil population at ~95% of live cells post-boost.

Portal's mechanoporation delivered GFP mRNA into neuronal progenitor cells (NPCs) without viral vectors and without transfection chemistry, achieving 75%+ GFP-positive cells one day after a single processing step. A fluorescent tracer co-delivered alongside the mRNA reached 70%+ of live cells at the strongest condition, with viability preserved up to 80%+ post-boost. Neuronal progenitor cells (NPCs) are multipotent precursor cells that give rise to neurons and glia. They are widely used as an iPSC-derived model for neurodevelopment, neurodegenerative disease, and CNS-directed therapeutics, and they have historically been one of the hardest mammalian cell types to engineer without viral vectors.