Zyoxel will collaborate with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and MatTek Corp. to develop a circuit of miniature human organs on a chip as part of a five year, up to $26.3 million program awarded by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The project aims to incorporate 10 micro-engineered living human tissues on a single integrated chip providing a versatile platform to predict the safety of new drugs and vaccines.
The Zyoxel team will be led by Dr, David Hughes, Head of Research and Development, and the MIT research by Professor Linda Griffith and colleagues in the Department of Biological Engineering.
Zyoxel’s LiverChip technology will also be used in a related Cooperative Agreement given to Professor Griffith, Draper Laboratories and researchers at the University of Pittsburgh by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The up to $6.25 million project aims to develop a model of liver metastasis and improve the understanding of how secondary tumours develop away from primary tumor sites.
Dr. Tim Hart, CEO of Zyoxel said: “Over a third of new drugs fail once they are tested in patients because scientists do not have suitable tools to predict how a drug will affect humans. We are delighted to be working with MIT and our other collaborators on these tissue models which have the capacity to speed the development of new therapies with fewer side-effects.”
The funding initiative brings together two major United States federal funding agencies, DARPA and the NIH, who have teamed up with the US Food and Drug Administration, to tackle drug failure with improved predictive tools. The NIH has committed $70 million to the five year initiative while DARPA’s commitment includes more than $60 million to support two research consortia led by MIT and Harvard University.
Zyoxel is an Isis Innovation spin-out from the University of Oxford. Founded in 2009 to develop technologies to improve pre-clinical drug testing and reduce animal experiments, Zyoxel’s Oxford-based researchers are developing models of the human gastrointestinal and endocrine systems.
Dr. David Hughes said: “Zyoxel’s LiverChip technology will provide an important building block in the development of an immune-competent model of the human liver, central to the microchip-based gastrointestinal system to be developed under this program”.
Date: August 8, 2012
Source: Zyoxel
Filed Under: Drug Discovery
