The Multi In Vitro Organ (MIVO) device is a disposable fluid-dynamic, multi-chamber culture system developed by React4Life, able to emulate portions of the human body. It is coupled with a high-engineered 3D cell laden hydrogel tumor model, with the aim to validate anticancer therapies improving the effectiveness of pharmaceutical tests and reducing animal testing. By recreating cell migration phenomena, MIVO allows the study of cancer metastasis onset and offers a new instrument for anticancer therapies validation. This allows changing the way pre-clinical research is carried out, by offering researchers an all-in-one solution to replace in vitro tests and animal tests for validating the best drug candidates for the clinical phase on humans.
MIVO represents a step-forward with respect to the animal model in terms of capacity to model in a more standard and reproducible way the dynamic behaviour of the human organism, thus allowing to use mice or other rodents only to validate the results of in vitro tests, as requested by the regulation in force. Considering the huge economic value of a single cycle of medical research, minimise the number of mice used during trials could represent significant savings for researchers. These achievements make our 3D tumour model and the bioreactor-based intravasation set-up superior to all available models and migration assays, because the latter do not allow to culture cells in a 3D dynamic environment of clinically relevant size and, at the same time, biologically active. This is poised to introduce a disruptive change in the global in vitro cell research, and considering the societal relevance of metastasis and the poor scientific knowledge about the metastatic onset, MIVO responds to a strong need on novel approaches to cancer treatment.
The Phase 1 Project objectives are:
Goal 1: Streamline the product development through iterative and comparative trials, where the MIVO KPIs will be compared with the animal models.
Goal 2: Define an Operational Plan, which will lead to the definition of the project work plan for the Clinical Validation as RuO.
Goal 3: Perform a risk assessment
Goal 4: Explore the Business Feasibility in order to ensure that the business opportunity behind the MIVO technology exists, and is sustainable for R4L
