The effect of Combinatorial Chemistry and High Throughput Screening (HTS) (more info) has been to create a new bottleneck in the drug development process.  There is no prospect of increasing the level of animal testing and so what is needed is HQS™, High Quality Screening, that screens out compounds that are likely to fail in the later stages of trials.

The technology being developed by Kirkstall addresses this exact requirement and our goal is to deliver a more effective early stage screening technology to the pharmaceutical industry.

Our mission is to develop technology, products and services that will remove bottlenecks and risks in the drug development process and speed new compounds to the market without using animal testing.

Kirkstall is developing toxicity screening products to be used by the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries that will reduce the need for animal testing (more info). Because the testing will be based on human cells, it should also reduce the risk of problems in human trials such as those tragic side effects that harmed the volunteers in the Vioxx trial.

Working in partnership with Pharmaceutical Companies and Contract Research Organisations (CRO’s) we are building accurate models of human metabolism.

Our products are oriented to the reduction of the Environment Discrepancy Problem (more info) that is nowadays one of the  limits to the value  of the High Throughput Screening technology.

Kirkstall has an exclusive world-wide licence to a patented multi-chamber bioreactor (MCB) technology from the University of Pisa, Italy. This technology combines leading edge research from bioscience, microelectronics, microfluidics and optics to create cell based assays that will accurately mimic the human metabolism. The result will be high quality rather than just high throughput screening.