BOTH HOSPITAL AND PHARMA NEED MORE PREDICTIVE MODELS FOR ASSESSING DRUG’S EFFECTS: There is a strong demand in the pharmaceutical and medical fields for more predictive models of the effect of drugs on patients. On the one hand, the pharmaceutical industry needs to replace animal tests and improve the human predictability of preclinical models (huge drug development attrition rate) to avoid unnecessary animal suffering and reduce overall drug development times and costs.
Numerous publications as well as feedback from the pharmaceutical industry and hospitals, show that organ-on-a-chip technology has become the preferred avenue of exploration for solving human drug effect prediction challenges. Indeed, thanks to their physio mimetic capabilities, these models are today the most capable of providing data as close as possible to human physiology.
However, despite several promising results, none of the existing and under-development technologies, has yet achieved the physio mimetic level required by hospital and pharmaceutical players to be sufficiently confident in the adoption and use of these new technologies.
Our joint work with pharmaceutical and hospital KOLs, has enabled us to identify 3 Scientific and 2 critical industrial problems in existing 3D culture systems, explaining the low adoption rate that can be summarized in the need for more complex biological feature, and industrial workflow integration.
This project is aiming at induystrializing our 3 propretary technology in the field of Microphysiological Systems (MPS) as well as to provide a validated protocol database to help industrial to standardized their protocols as well as improving the reproducibility of the results.
Our MPS, named CubiX, is able to precisely control the microenvironment of complex 3D cell culture (organoids) in a precise and dynamic manner. We have proved that the level of organoids complexity enable by our technologies is allowing to have an improved predictability of a drug effect on human.
IMPACT: Offering a truly predictive model of the effect of drugs will also have a high impact on the sustainable Development Goals defined by United Nation: Good human health, animal welfare, UE technological innovation, decent work and economic growth and contribute to gender equality.
REGULATION CONTEXT: Recent changes in European and American regulations, such as the FDA modernization act 2.0 of 2022, FDA modernisation act 3.0 in Dec 2024, the NIH phase out roadmap in February 2025 and the expecting European Commission phase out roadmap in March 2026 are strongly pushing toward a drastic reduction in the animal use for scientific purpose, and strongly encouraging the use of alternative technology such as the one developed by Cherry Biotech.
