For almost 50 years, the R&D 100 Awards have been recognizing the year’s best new high-technology products. Determined by a panel of experts chosen by R&D Magazine, the award is recognition that the selected product is one of the most important innovations of the year. Plasticell's CombiCult was chosen as one of the hundred for 2011, which included only three technologies from the U.K.

CombiCult was invented to solve the major bottleneck in stem cell research and development, and by extension, the bottleneck to regenerative drug discovery and cell therapy R&D. In its current iteration, the CombiCult workflow allows a single scientist to discover multiple methods of differentiating any stem cell to a mature cell-type of choice in weeks - the status quo takes a whole team of scientists years to discover perhaps a few non-optimal methods. CombiCult does this by effectively performing 10-100,000 experiments in parallel testing millions of combinations of differentiating factors in one go.