Project description
Revolutionary drug monitoring method
The early stages of drug screening in preclinical models are central for the subsequent steps in the pipeline and the reduction of cost. Funded by the HORIZON programme, the VITALA project aims to introduce a groundbreaking solution in the process of drug efficacy monitoring. The technology combines Organ-on-Chip and magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging, offering the potential to track a drug's metabolic pathway within cells. Moreover, the technology is more efficient, cost-effective and is expected to minimise the use of experimental animals in drug development. The accuracy of the method is expected to transform the entire drug discovery process, preventing inappropriate drug candidates from advancing to later clinical trial stages.
Objective
Excellence: Vitala Technologies brings together Organ-on-Chip (OoC), hyperpolarized magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (HP MRSI), and advanced data analysis tools to provide a patented and revolutionary test for the monitoring of the efficacy in treatment of a new drug moving through the metabolic pathways of a cell. This new methodology provides the opportunity to set preclinical drug testing strategies that are more effective, faster, cheaper, and reduce animal use. The information obtained by this novel methodology will improve the future steps for drug candidates in advanced pre-clinical and clinical stages. Vitala’s analysis allows defining and executing on pre-clinical testing strategies, increasing the speed of the drug discovery process, and reducing its costs.
Impact: An increased accuracy in the early stages of the drug screening process will allow discarding inadequate pharmaceutical candidates before those reach the animal testing stage, reducing the number of animals used in the whole pre-clinical process. Moreover, our objective is to de-risk and revolutionise the entire drug discovery process, decreasing the direct and indirect costs associated with the pre-clinical drug discovery pipeline with our real-time, non-destructive, highly sensitive technology. Vitala’s impact will expand to later phases of drug discovery by preventing in-vitro and in vivo as well as human testing of drugs that in the absence of translatable models could have been deemed appropriate to proceed to later clinical trial stages.
Implementation and team: Vitala is formed by a management team of professionals with complementary backgrounds in the fields of microfluidics, imaging technologies and business administration. Vitala has already filled a PCT patent application and successfully completed an FTO, which gives our technology a green light to be exploited both in the EU and the USA with short and long term strategies in place.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.3.2 - European innovation ecosystems Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-CSA - HORIZON Coordination and Support ActionsCoordinator
08221 Terrassa
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.