We are delighted to announce that we are showcased as one of the 50 companies in PwC UK’s ‘Life Sciences Future 50’ report.

The report illustrates the world-class science and innovation being led by the UK’s life sciences sector to solve some of the most important challenges in scientific research and human healthcare.

The Future50 sample is the result of a rigorous research process starting with the identification of 500+ UK-based innovative life sciences companies with the potential to deliver breakthrough solutions.

Selection was based upon:

• Impact potential: the problem the company is trying to solve,
• Breakthrough science and innovation: what they are doing to solve it,
• Differentiation: how they are doing it,
• Maturity: where they are on their journey.

Find out more in the full report here.

See p35 for CN Bio.

Our PhysioMimix OOC systems, which are designed to generate translational single, and multi-organ in vitro models, will be used to culture ciPTECs under perfusion flow to recreate a human kidney model for research use, ADME profiling and nephrotoxicity testing.

Improved models of the human kidney are urgently required within preclinical drug development to more accurately identify and eliminate the 20% of compounds that currently fail in the clinic due to nephrotoxicity.

Contact us to register your interest

Learn more about Cell4Pharma

The poster will cover the company’s MicroMix technology. MicroMix uses pumps and valves to, precisely control and vary with time, the concentration of drug within each well of a multi-well plate. The technology can be used to perform combination and scheduling studies in oncology.

Poster Title: “In vitro assessment of combination dosing regimens with in vivo like pharmacokinetic concentration profiles enabled by a microfluidic addition and removal device.”
Presentation Date: Sunday Apr 15, 2018 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Session Location: Poster Section 45

More information and registration for the AACR Annual Meeting 2018 is available here.

These technologies will be important particularly for pharmaceutical and biotech companies as they look towards the future. Will these companies continue be able to stand in front of the regulators with “standard” animal data, and provide persuasive evidence on how safe and effective these medicines are going to be when given to a human being? Or will they need to test these drugs on actual human tissues using new Organ-on-Chip devices.

CN Bio’s Organ-on-Chip technology comes out of bio-engineering labs at Oxford, MIT and Vanderbilt Universities, and enables human cells to function in the lab as they would within the organ.

CN Bio is also collaborating with the US FDA to use Organ-on-Chips to improve drug development and evaluation.

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In this interview, CEO of CN Bio Dr Emma Sceats talks to PharmaVentures Insights about the opportunities for a step change in testing drugs, cosmetics and consumer goods.

A team of Vanderbilt University scientists and engineers led by Professor John P. Wikswo won the R&D 100 Award for their MultiWell MicroFormulator.

The MultiWell MicroFormulator, developed at Vanderbilt and commercialized by CN Bio provides customized real-time formulation, delivery and removal of cell culture media to each well of a 96-well plate for drug delivery, toxicology research, and personalized medicine.

The technology offers a promising alternative to existing fluid-handling systems for long-term cell culture studies and greatly reduces the cost and footprint of such systems.

“This is an excellent example of translational research. Our work on pumps and valves began as an undergraduate research project, was then funded by the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health, and is now moving into pharma,” Wikswo said. “It was great to attend the R&D awards ceremony and see all the other projects from industry and national laboratories – they really understand translation.”

The R&D 100 awards—called the “Oscars of Innovation”—recognize the 100 most technologically significant products introduced into the marketplace each year. R&D Magazine’s independent panel of more than 50 judges selects winners. Wikswo and his group won an R&D 100 Award in 1984 for a Neuromagnetic Current Probe.

Wikswo, the founding director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education (VIIBRE), and Ronald S. Reiserer, VIIBRE laboratory manager and leader of the engineering on the MultiWell MicroFormulator, accepted the award at R&Ds 55th annual awards ceremony in November. Wikswo is also Gordon A. Cain University Professor and A. B. Learned Professor of Living State Physics, and a professor of biomedical engineering, molecular physiology and biophysics, and physics.

Wikswo and his group have worked for the past seven years to develop micropumps and microvalves to provide automatic computer control of fluids in analytical instruments and between two or more human organ mimics. This work led to the MultiWell MicroFormulator, which provides long-term delivery and removal of fluid from a multiwell plate or microplate, each well of which can hold a minute amount of liquid, such as media for cell culture.

“In contrast to bringing lots of well plates to a large and expensive high-throughput screening (HTS) robot, we are bringing a small and low-cost robot to each well plate,” Wikswo said. The MultiWell MicroFormulator also can simulate the function of organs that may be missing from multi-organ-chip systems, such as those that secrete vital hormones.

CN Bio Innovations Ltd., a biotechnology spinoff from Oxford University, has secured a combination of exclusive and non-exclusive rights to microfluidic technologies developed by Wikswo.

On Nov. 1, the company announced a research collaboration with a global biopharmaceutical company to validate the MultiWell MicroFormulator as a new in vitro research tool to predict optimized drug dosing regimens for multi-drug therapies.

David Hughes, CN Bio’s chief technical officer, said, “With these additional technologies, the precision and control we can achieve over conditions in each well of a 96-well plate and in vitro organ-mimics open up exciting new possibilities for modelling human biology and disease in the laboratory.”

VIIBRE’s first 96-Channel MicroFormulator as it is being prepared for shipment in January 2016.

The licensed technologies could replace studies that use mice by mimicking in vivo drug exposure in an in vitro system. The MultiWell MicroFormulator could be used to optimize the conditions for stem cell differentiation, according to CN Bio.

Read the Vanderbilt release here

Under a $26M Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract awarded to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Continuum LLC and CN Bio Innovations the team led by MIT Professor Linda Griffith have pioneered multi-organ platforms which are already being used by pharmaceutical companies to aid their search for safer and more effective medicines.

Dr Murat Cirit, Director of the Translational Systems Pharmacology team on the $26 million DARPA-PhysioMimetics program will disclose new data developed using the 7-organ platform during his presentation entitled “Human Physiome-on-a-Chip: A Systems Pharmacology Approach”.  The first public demonstrations of the 7-organ platform will be given at the CN Bio booth in the main hall on both days of the congress.

CN Bio are platinum sponsors of the Organ-on-Chip World Congress at which keynote presentations will be given by CN Bio’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr David Hughes and MIT Professor Linda Griffith.

For more information on the conference or how to register at reduced rates, get in touch.

The conference brings together the world’s leading experts in Organ-on-chip technology from academia and industry, for two days of research symposia, technology demonstrations and unparalleled networking opportunities.

CN Bio CTO, David Hughes, will be giving a keynote presentation entitled “LiverChip – Development of Organ-on-a-chip Liver Disease Models” before chairing a Panel discussion discussing the challenges and opportunities in the Organ-on-Chip space. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Linda Griffith, lead investigator and CN Bio collaborator on the high profile Microphysiological Systems (MPS) program funded by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will give the Plenary Keynote entitled “Move Over, Mice — How the Fusion of Systems Biology with Organs on Chips May Humanize Drug Development”.

For more information on the conference or how to register at reduced rates, get in touch or visit our new website.

Maureen Coleman, Executive Chairman of CN Bio, said “David Scales and I are delighted to appoint Emma as his successor. The board thanks David for his excellent stewardship of the company since 2013 during which time the company has grown and expanded to become a major force in organ-on-chip technologies.

Dr Sceats holds Masters and doctorate degrees in Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford, and joined CN Bio in 2010 from a role in technology licensing at Isis Innovation, the University of Oxford’s office of technology transfer. At CN Bio Dr Sceats has led sales, partnering and in-licensing initiatives which have resulted in development of the company’s most significant intellectual property, products and services. In the past three years she has completed deals with more than twenty pharmaceutical companies, and in her capacity as Chief Operating Officer oversaw relocation of the company in 2015 to new facilities including Containment Level 3 labs in Welwyn Garden City.

Chairman Maureen Coleman said “David Scales and I are delighted to hand leadership to the next generation. Emma Sceats and David Hughes our Chief Technical Officer have been instrumental in driving the progress and development of CN Bio. The board and investors of the company are confident that as the core of the leadership team they will continue to work together to ensure further success of the company.

Welwyn Garden City, UK, 2 Nov 2015: CN Bio Innovations Ltd, an expert in developing human organ chip platforms to test and develop therapeutics for serious diseases, has announced that new data from its research collaboration with Imperial College London, where the team are analysing a novel human, full-viral-lifecycle model of Hepatitis B, will be presented in the late-breaking poster session at The Liver Meeting® 2015, San Francisco USA (13-17 November, 2015).

Dr Marcus Dorner (Imperial College London), Lead Principle Investigator for the study, and Dr David Hughes, CN Bio’s Chief Technical Officer, will be available during the session which takes place on November the 16^th from 12:30 – 2:00 pm to discuss the poster presentation entitled, “Microfluidic liver cultures as preclinical tool for the study of hepatitis B and C virus as well as malaria”.

Dr Hughes joined the Company in 2010 as Head of Engineering and was promoted to Technical Director in February 2013 followed by a promotion to Chief Technology Officer in July 2014. He has been pivotal in securing contracts with leading pharmaceutical companies and has been lead principal investigator on several UK, EU and US grants including currently the EU FP7 BIO-MIMETICS project. As co-principal investigator on a $26 Mi US DARPA contract, Dr Hughes has contributed to the strategic direction of this program as well as leading the company’s participation and delivery of milestones under the contract. Prior to joining CN Bio, Dr Hughes graduated from the University of Oxford with a Masters in Engineering Science and Doctorate in Chemical Engineering. After that he spent three years in industry at GSK.

Maureen Coleman, Chairman of CN Bio said ” On behalf of the board of CN Bio Innovations I am delighted to announce that Dr David Hughes has been appointed as a director of the company and will join the board immediately. This clearly recognises David’s growing contribution not only in leading the growth in excellence of science in the company but to its ongoing business and commercial development.”