Ever wondered why it takes over a decade to bring new drugs to the market? One big reason is that testing new treatments in a lab, before they reach patients, is complex and lengthy.
At Locsense, we contribute to changing that. As part of the initiative NXTGEN Hightech BIOMED for example, we bring our expertise in hardware, software, and impedance spectroscopy to enable more predictive studies of how drugs are absorbed, processed and when they become toxic.
In this approach, we are developing monitoring equipment for a digestive system on a chip that mimics the interaction between the gut and the liver. Before drugs can be effective, the human body needs to absorb (gut) and process it (liver). The combined technologies enable studying the entire process of how a drug moves through the digestive system.
Because the microfluidic organ-on-chip enables studying organ interactions on human cells or in the future even person specific cells, it leads to more effective drug development and helps in reducing the use of animals for testing of organ interactions. If we can obtain representative results for the human body from organ-on-chip models, there will be less need to test drugs on animals.
Our contribution
With our teamwork in the NXTGEN Hightech project we aim to:
- Enable more effective and cost efficient drug development
- Turn science into treatments faster.
- Reduce animal testing by replacing traditional animal models with smarter, human-based lab platforms.
- Speeding up the development of new laboratory tools.
- Boost European high-tech manufacturing and local supply chains.
- Driving economic growth by strengthening specialized industries
This project is made possible in part by a contribution from the National Growth Fund program NXTGEN Hightech
