Regio Zuid-Holland | Organ on a chip platform for drug discovery

BI/OND aims at changing the lives of millions of patients by providing innovative hardware solutions for enabling personalized medicines. ..Nowadays, biologists must choose between two options when running pre-clinical models in the early phase of drug testing: in vivo studies conducted on animals or in vitro screening..However, in vitro model and animals have shown to be inadequate for testing new pharmaceuticals to treat the many diseases that afflict humans...Organ on a chip are one of the most promising tools to disrupt the pre-clinical drug development, reduce animals and enabling personalized medicine by combining the use of microchips with 3D tissue models..However, the use of organ on a chip technology still heavily relies on microscopy, very labour and time intensive activity. As deeply focused on hardware solutions, Bi/ond is currently investigating the possibility to integrate electrodes, providing more than simple imaging to biologists. .In this project, Bi/ond will investigate on creating the interface between electrodes and the organ on a chip and how the customer should interface with the system. In parallel, an intensive research on the size of the market for this second generation of organ on chip and business model will be performed...This project is in line with the Kennis- en Innovatieagenda Sleuteltechnologieën (KIA-ST), Nanotechnology, Components and circuit and Embedded systems with a specific focus on life science technologies. In particular, it is mentioned explicitly in the Healthcare roadmap 2018 the disruptive potential that organ on a chip technology can have in precision medicine.