Title of the project: MIVO-HTS: A new micro-fluid platform for the development of new drugs.
Object: The design of a multi-organ-on-chip platform to improve and accelerate drug testing in the preclinical phase, discover innovative and personalized therapies, reducing animal testing.
The project:
MIVO-HTS platform is a multi-organ-on-chip emulating organs of the human body in the lab and it is based on MIVO® Technology.
It will improve and accelerate drug testing in the preclinical phase, discover novel personalized therapies and reduce animal testing.
Currently, it has been developed in a prototype phase and has already been tested and validated in the laboratory (TRL 6); it is the only product that allows
(i) to host 3D human tissues with a high number of replicas per platform,
(ii) connect different human tissues with a fluid system to better represent the interactions between the different organs,
(iii) grow immune cells in a physiological flow and study their interaction with the hosted tissues to test immunotherapies,
(iv) recreate the administration of drugs by oral (by cultivating intestinal tissues) or systemic (by recreating the vascular barrier) for more realistic tests than current laboratory tests.
In the field of basic research and preclinical pharmacological research, there is an increasing need for new, more realistic in vitro approaches.
The scientific community knows very well that cell behaviour in 2D cultures is not comparable to in-vivo because cell-cell interactions and drug diffusion are different.
At the same time, animal models often do not represent human biology and disease progression (such as cancer) and are therefore poorly predictive. The risk is to select molecules/ drugs that will prove ineffective in the following clinical trials carried out in humans.
For these reasons, researchers and pharmacologists need new in vitro models with higher predictability and able to emulate human biology.
MIVO-HTS platform will be
(i) an easy-to-use technological solution to avoid excessive operational complications,
(ii) flexible to allow rapid progress in the understanding of human diseases and testing of new therapeutic approaches,
(iii) scalable, enabling faster pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic assays for better and safer drugs.
Project funded by Smart&Start Italia – PON Imprese e competitività 2014-2020, Asse III, Priority investment 3a, Actions 3.5.1 – Project identification code CUP C36I22000130008.