Business development of a drug screening Spin-off company based on 2D & 3D human iPSC-derived liver cell models for NASH & (i)DILI.

The goal of this proposal is to create a spin-off focused on providing medium to high throughput toxicology screenings with 2D and 3D cell culture systems for liver diseases such as DILI and NASH. Current models cannot reproduce the complex behavior of liver cells in response to drug treatments or model complex diseases. This constitutes a major hurdle for pharmaceutical and biotech companies, leading to termination of clinical trials and scarcity of novel drugs in the market. The unique selling point of our proposal is the capacity of predicting drug toxicity more accurately than the commercially available models and to enable accurate modeling of cell-cell interactions during inflammation, steatosis and fibrogenic responses. Combining the robust genomic engineered cell models created by our group with a fit-for-purpose built automation platform, already installed and validated at the Stem Cell Institute, we can create functional, complex, 2D and 3D cell cultures from hiPSC-derived mature liver cell progeny. This will circumvent the problem of primary liver cell availability and variability that impede creating robust and consistent liver disease models.

Keywords:human iPS cells, hepatocytes, robotized toxicity screen, disease modeling, business development

Disciplines:Stem cell biology