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Dypha: adding the dimension of time to cell culture

Project description

Developing drugs with kinetics

The drug development process faces staggering inefficiencies, with 9 out of 10 drugs failing in human trials. A lack of efficacy and safety (primarily due to the limited predictivity of current cell culture and animal models) accounts for most failures. While advanced human cell culture models like organoids and spheroids show promise, their overly simplistic environments hinder accurate human response predictions. Additionally, these models lack temporal resolution, an essential feature of human body processes, forcing reliance on costly and less effective animal studies. The EIC-funded Dypha project introduces a solution featuring a µFluidic Adaptor. It is an innovative device that seamlessly integrates with standard 96-well plates, enabling precise, automated fluid exchange and kinetics control, thereby transforming cell culture research.

Objective

The current preclinical drug development pipeline is highly inefficient with 9 out of 10 drugs failing when first tested in humans. Of those failures, between 69% and 81% is due to a lack of efficacy (52-57%) or safety (17-24%), indicating that the predictivity of currently used cell culture and animal models is not high enough. While promising human cell culture models have arisen in the last decades (e.g. pluripotent stem cell models, spheroids, organoids), the environment of these models is too simplistic to reach their full potential and to translate certain responses to humans.

One of the important aspects missing in current cell culture is kinetics: many processes in the human body have response times with resolutions of seconds, minutes or hours. In standard cell culture however, such temporal resolution is absent because cell culture medium remains unchanged for typically 1-3 days. So for kinetics, scientists turn to animal models with relatively low translational success and high costs.

As an alternative, complex microfluidic setups have been used to enable perfusion in vitro and demonstrated a significant amount of evidence that kinetics can improve the relevance of cell culture models. Despite the evidence, typical cell culture biologists are not taking kinetics into account because the tools to control kinetics in cell culture are too complex.

We solve this problem by starting from what cell culture biologists currently use: a standard well plate. We developed a Fluidic Adaptor that can be clamped on any 96 well plate and completely replaces the fluid in the well homogenously without disturbing the cell culture. Our goal is to develop a plug-and-play peripheral system that integrates automated fluidics and microscopic readout in a fully controlled environment: the ypha System. The system uses Fluidic Adaptors that can be designed for different applications or well plate formats.

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Topic(s)

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HORIZON-EIC - HORIZON EIC Grants

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) HORIZON-EIC-2023-TRANSITION-01

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Coordinator

DEMCON SYNC BIOSYSTEMS BV
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 878 250,00
Address
INSTITUTENWEG 25
7521PH Enschede
Netherlands

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Region
Oost-Nederland Overijssel Twente
Activity type
Private for-profit entities (excluding Higher or Secondary Education Establishments)
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 134 875,00

Participants (5)

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