An integrated drug discovery and development platform
We are working towards leveraging our immune organoid platform to develop targeted and cellular therapies for cancer, infection, and auto immune disease.
The drugs patients take were likely generated and tested in test tubes and animal models and prescribed without knowing if they will provide benefit to an individual patient. We aim to:
Generate antibody and cellular therapies from human tissue, resulting in safer, more effective drug candidates.
Safely test how drug candidates effect human tissue, and pick the most effective therapies for clinical trials.
Measure how a patients own tissue will respond to available drugs, and pick the therapies that will work best for each patient.
Antibody therapy
By leveraging NextVivo’s lymphoid organoid technology we aim to create an efficient, high fidelity platform for generating fully human therapeutic antibodies with improved safety and efficacy against a broad range of therapeutic targets.
Monoclonal antibodies represent the most successful class of new therapeutics. However, current technologies rely on non-human systems such as virus or animal models.
We are working towards applying our platform to develop antibody therapies generated in human models that replicate the adaptive immune response.
Cancer cell therapy
NextVivo’s tumor organoids enable generation of cellular therapies that are derived from a patient’s own immune cells and are optimized to recognize a patient’s individual tumor cells.
By replicating physiologically accurate models of spatial and functional interactions between disease and immune cells, we can recapitulate the mechanisms through which the immune system generates T lymphocytes that attack tumor cells based on recognition of specific antigens displayed on their surface. We are working towards applying this platform to generate personalized cancer cell therapies.
Preclinical drug testing
Nine out of ten experimental drugs fail in clinical studies because the lab and animal studies used to develop them cannot predict how they will behave in patients. NextVivo’s organoids allow immune modulating therapies to be tested on human tissue samples to identify the ones that work.
We have developed organoids to study and evaluate drug candidates across a range of diseases for which few, if any, model systems exist. Our platform has potential applications to enable testing of vaccine candidates for infectious diseases, immune modulating therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases, and measurement of adverse immune side effects in model systems before giving drugs to patients.
For each disease, NextVivo’s organoids can help design safer, smarter, more efficient clinical trials to test only the most promising drug candidates in patients.
Precision diagnostics
Many drugs benefit only a fraction of patients who receive them, but there are no models to determine which patients will respond to which drugs. NextVivo’s organoids can be leveraged to identify the best drug for an individual patient by testing multiple candidate therapies on a patient’s individual disease tissue.
Our goal is to help patients receive the drugs that will most benefit them while avoiding unnecessary harmful side effects from taking ineffective drugs. We also aim to improve the success rates of clinical trials by integrating our functional tests as criteria for patient enrollment such that drugs are only tested in patients who are most likely to benefit.
