Existing lab and animal models simply do not simulate the conditions of the human body sufficiently. This leads to unforeseen issues with toxicity and functionality of drugs and vaccines when moving on to clinical trials.
In particular current animal models have poor predictive power in determining human safety, toxicity and efficacy responses. To compensate for the failure to produce highly predictive outcomes, large number of tests are carried out, but still unsuitable drugs are taken forward from preclinical testing, 90% of which will fail in clinical trials. This is where Micro-Physiological Systems (MPS) come in. MPS’s are tissues grown from stem cells or primary cells and are also known as organoids and/or spheroids. The
development of organoid models which have predictive correlations of up to 90% are a game changer in this space. When exposed to different chemical cocktails these cells can mature into different tissue types for example liver, heart or brain cells which can then grow into 3D structures. These structures have gene & protein expression profiles representative of their parent organs and can interact with each other in much the same way as they would in a human body making them a powerful test bed for potential new drugs. However, a lack of technologies in the market make it difficult to screen MPS’s at the scale required by drug companies
Mera is Hooke Bio’s answer to this problem. Using patented fluid management technologies, Mera has the ability to culture, drug & stain MPS’s on a large scale while monitoring everything in real time, through a fully automated florescent microscope.
Cells or MPS’s are added to a patented bio-plate. The plate is then integrated into the main Mera system. A chemical cocktail can be introduced to batches of wells on a plate in order to mature the cells into different tissue types such as liver, heart, neuronal or cancer MPS’s. Once mature, the fluid pathway can be changed to allow the introduction of a drug or stain to batches of multiple different tissue types. The fluid can then be recirculated, replicating the conditions in the human body where organs interact with each other. The whole process can be monitored using the automated microscope in wide field or florescent modes. The system is modular and scalable, allowing a single unit to run up to 800 MPS’s simultaneously, eight times more than our nearest competitor, reducing the cost of drug
discovery by hundreds of millions of dollars and significantly reducing the need for animal testing.
