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Benefits and Applications

Improved cell viability

Controlling oxygen, pH, temperature and air-flow within the specially designed culture chamber means cell viability is improved by up to seven times.

Optimised nutrient flow results in increased vitality and longer life for most cells than in a static environment.

Successful long term culture of cells

The dynamic flow of nutrient media can be controlled at different rates through multiple culture chambers.  Selecting different media and flow rates, allows successful long term culture (up to and exceeding 28 days) of different cell types in the same experiment.

Culture of specific cells

Specific cells can be cultured for use by specific industries, for instance, skin and liver tissues can be constructed and grown in the system for the chemical and cosmetics industries. Potentially, cell types from most, if not all tissues can be used in the system to investigate specific toxicities or to help in identifying new drug candidates in the pharmaceutical industry.

Multiple cell types in the same system

More physiologically accurate models are available as cell to cell signalling is possible between different types of cells in multiple inter-connected chamber experiments.

Cost effective

The cost is reduced as micro-fabricated reservoirs use only millilitres of nutrient media and micrograms of expensive test compounds.

Flexible system

Modular units have been designed with flexibility and ease of use in mind. 3D cultures on scaffolds, membranes or tissues can be connected in series or parallel. The system fits easily in a standard CO2 incubators.

Applications

The Quasi-vivo system can be used for many bio-pharma applications:

  • Drug development
    A highly cost effective and accurate formulation screen before animal or human clinical trails.
  • Regenerative medicine
    The advanced tissue culture environment allows faster growth of more physiologically accurate tissue to produce for example cartilage, or cardiac tissue.
  • Safety and Toxicity screening
    Multi-chamber interconnected culture of different cell types allows cell-to-cell signalling providing a more physiologically accurate models of inflammatory or immune response than cells grown in multi-well plates. Also cultures of hepatocytes can be linked to cells from target tissues to measure the toxicity of metabolites.
  • ADME studies
    Hepatocytes in the system have been shown to retain their metabolic capability for at least 28 days, compared to just a few hours for freshly isolated primary hepatocytes.  As obtaining primary human hepatocytes is difficult to guarantee, this opens up many more human studies than is currently possible. Comparative metabolism between species can be investigated helping to facilitate the choice of species for preclinical studies, particularly important in the pharmaceutical industry with liver cells for drug toxicity testing, generation of metabolites and also to allow comparative, inter-species differences in metabolism to be investigated.
  • Disease modelling
    In-vitro models of disease, such as glaucoma or hypertension can be created within the system by allowing pressure or flow stress to be applied to the cultured tissue.
  • Stem cell research
    Culture conditions can be regulated and modulated in an accurate and reproducible way giving better control on lineage, controlling the phenotype that the stem cell adopts.