BEL technology licensed to InSphero
License agreement for Akura™ Flow organ-on-a-chip platform concluded between ETH Zurich, Bio Engineering Laboratory, and InSphero AG.
external page InSphero AG, a BEL spinoff, and ETH Zurich have completed the licence agreement for InSphero’s Akura™ Flow organ-on-a-chip platform. external page Akura™ Flow is a commercially available “plug and play” microphysiological system (MPS), engineered to enable pharmaceutical and academic researchers to integrate 3D spheroid models in single- and multi-tissue organ networks for preclinical drug efficacy and toxicity testing applications.
The collaboration between BEL and InSphero on "organ-on-a-chip" solutions started 2011 as part of a European-Commission-funded external page “Body on a Chip (BoC)” Project, which was aimed at mimicking the response of the human body to drugs for safety and efficacy testing. Working in collaboration, microfluidic experts at BEL and InSphero were able to refine early prototypes of the BOC system and create solutions, suitable for industry applications including external page low-clearance assays, external page prodrug activation, and external page metabolic disease modeling. With the financial support of the Swiss Innovation Agency external page InnoSuisse, the work on commercialization of the Akura™ Flow platform continued to ensure operational robustness and trustworthy results demanded by the pharmaceutical industry. Akura™ Flow technology was developed to be simple and quick to set up and feature the capability to automatically extract 3D microtissues from the microfluidic devices for downstream next-generation sequencing, histology, or other endpoints. It is compatible with all commonly used laboratory automation tools.
More information on external page Akura™ Flow technology.
Link to external page scientific paper.