Emulate, Inc. announces strategic partnership with leading pharmaceutical company to apply the ‘Human Emulation System’ as a platform for drug discovery.
Emulate, Inc. has formed a strategic partnership with F Hoffman La-Roche AG (Roche) that will use Emulate’s Human Emulation System across R&D programs to enable more human-relevant studies that will lead to earlier and better prediction of safety and efficacy of drug candidates.
The partnership will use the Human Emulation System—a lab-ready system comprised of Organ-Chips, instrumentation, and software apps—to discover and develop new classes of therapeutic antibodies and drug combinations, many of which have complexities and human-specific features.
The partnership is designed to use Organ-Chips that reflect the complex biology required to model the effects of therapeutic antibodies in humans, overcoming the limitations of current preclinical experimental methods. Emulate’s Organ-Chips recreate the complex, dynamic state in which cells function within a human organ. Immune cells can also be introduced into Organ-Chips, which allows for human-relevant testing of antibodies and drug combinations.
Other components of the partnership include using Organ-Chips to gain further insight into disease mechanisms, to increase predictability and early detection of biomarkers, and to reduce the use of animals in scientific testing. An additional goal of the partnership is to use patient-derived cells in Organ-Chips to make progress with strategies for personalized drug safety and allow a new approach to augment the prediction of disease or treatment variation between individuals.
Through this three-year research partnership, scientists from both companies will work side-by-side, initially within Emulate’s labs in Boston.
The partnership features an innovative approach based in a jointly-run lab at Emulate where scientists will work together to use Organ-Chips for testing of efficacy and safety of new antibody therapeutics and combination therapies.
Emulate will provide its technology along with the scientific expertise to implement a range of experimental designs for evaluating Roche’s drug candidates. The collaborative research will initially focus on using Emulate’s Lung-Chip and Brain-Chip, with the opportunity to expand to use other Organ-Chips.
(Source: Emulate, Inc. via Business Wire)
Filed Under: Drug Discovery
