Roche, Mimetas develop “gut-on-a-chip” tech for drug-testing

Mimetas said today that it collaborated with Roche (OTC:RHHBY) to develop an organ-on-a-chip system that is designed to evaluate intestinal permeability in 3D gut tubules following exposure to drug compounds.

The results of the collaboration were published in Nature Communications.

The researchers reported that the intestinal tubules were leak-tight after just four days in culture and that they expressed specific transporters and receptors. The team’s gut model could be used to assess drug toxicology and to study diseases relating to the intestinal barrier.

“This article in a major journal shows the world what the OrganoPlate platform is capable of,” Mimetas managing director Paul Vulto said in prepared remarks. “With 350 gut tubes and over 20,000 data points measured, this is the largest organ-on-a-chip dataset ever published. It demonstrates that 3D cell culture under perfusion flow isn’t necessarily complex to do. In fact, every cell biologist is now able to work with OrganoPlates and reproduce our results.”

“Scientists at Mimetas and elsewhere around the world are developing stunning 3D cell culture models in the OrganoPlate platform every day,” Vulto added. “The fact that one can culture tubules, blood vessels, and tissue co-cultures in 3D, without artificial membranes and with an unprecedented imaging quality, enables researchers to study human tissue biology in a completely novel way. We are proud to support these fantastic scientists in their search for ever more physiologically relevant tissue models. We are now making this technology available to every scientist in the world.”

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