Corning History: Echoes of Life Science Innovations Trailblazers

For nearly 110 years, Corning Life Sciences has been an industry trailblazer and innovator. It's shepherded the scientific community through decades of progress and research achievements. Throughout all Corning history, its steadfast vision and mission have helped researchers bring game-changing innovations to life.

One underlying goal encompasses that mission and all of Corning's innovations. At every turn, Corning helps scientists harness and leverage the power of cells, largely through using cell culture. That commitment opened the door for early vaccine development, and today, it fuels advancements in cancer research and cell therapy.

Here's a look at some of Corning's greatest cell culture achievements and the people involved.

The Beginning of Cell Culture

In the early 1900s, scientists were already toying with cells in vitro. However, none could culture them consistently. Ross Harrison, a biologist and anatomist at Johns Hopkins University, broke down this wall in 1907 when he developed a new surgical and antiseptic technique for cell culture.

While experimenting with frog embryos, he inserted frog neural tube fragments into a drop of fresh frog lymph he had placed on a sterile coverslip. After lymph clotting, he inverted the coverslip over the well in a glass depression slide. This created a hanging drop culture that enabled Harrison to observe the growth of frog nerve fibers — in vitro — from neurons in explanted tissue.

His efforts solved the underlying problems around medium, culture vessel, observation, and culture contamination. The discovery also solidified cell culture as a research tool that would eventually be critical to producing vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, and cell-produced drugs.

In 1910, two other researchers — Alexis Carrel and Montrose Burrows — built upon Harrison's technique, pivoting to using warm-blood tissues with chicken plasma. Within months, they had developed their first cell lines.

Corning's contributions to cell culture and life science innovation launched with Carrel. After 13 years of cell culture experiments, he developed the first practical cell culture flask. This D-flask was manufactured with Corning^® PYREX^® glass. With these flasks, Carrel and other investigators submerged plasma clots in larger amounts of medium, making subcultures easier to feed and maintain.

The life science innovations continued. During the race to create a polio vaccine, Leone Farrell, a Canadian biochemist and microbiologist, used 5L PYREX Povitsky bottles to develop the Toronto Technique, a method that gently rocked cell cultures. Her efforts accelerated polio vaccine production.

In 1974, Corning introduced the first disposable plastic laboratory products, including the canted-neck flasks and 15 mL and 50 mL centrifuge tubes in racks, eliminating the need for autoclaving glass, improving lab safety and allowing for the conditioning of surfaces to promote better cell growth.

Corning continued to introduce innovations in stacked plastic vessels to increase the volume of cells grown, including Corning CellCUBE^® systems, CellSTACK^® Chambers, and HYPERStack^®. Decades later, stacked vessels are still the workhorse behind many vaccines and scale-up processes.

Over time, Corning constructed its trailblazing efforts around customer needs and feedback. By listening to customer challenges and investigative pain points, Corning has created a cadre of next-generation cultureware and lab products. These tools perform consistently and support high-quality results.

For example, Corning Matrigel^® matrix supports applications of organoid models for precision medicine. Specifically, Matrigel matrix is often used for 3D cell culture models for cancer research. Corning has been a long-standing proponent of 3D technology development because it holds tremendous potential for oncology research with in vivo-like disease models. These efforts align with the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act 2.0's call for using more non-animal models, including organoids, in research and development.

Corning developed the Elplasia^® Flask to help investigators generate high densities of spheroids. These bulk spheroids are critical to drug screening, cancer research, and other applications like advanced cell therapy research. With Corning's Ultra-Low Attachment (ULA), the flask's surface is an animal-free, covalently bonded hydrogel that supports the creation and easy harvesting of a high density of spheroids in a scaffold-free environment.

Corning has also made great strides with its HYPER technology — tools that support greater adherent cell growth in small spaces. HYPERStack cell culture vessels are high-yield, small-footprint tools for cell and gene therapy applications in biopharmaceutical production. Corning's Ascent^® Fixed Bed Bioreactor system has significantly expanded scalability. With these tools, researchers can move from development scale to manufacturing scale (1 m² to 1,000 m²). This technology can be particularly helpful for manufacturing processes that require large amounts of adherent cells.