Studying the effect of potential therapies on the human brain is exceedingly difficult. Laboratory animals have proven to be less than ideal as mimics for identifying how a given therapy will work in people, leading to exceedingly long and difficult research journeys.
Now AxoSim, a company based in New Orleans, will soon be making its Mini-Brain platform available to researchers who are studying how the brain functions, developing new drugs, and testing the toxicity of various chemicals. The technology behind the Mini-Brain has been licensed from Johns Hopkins University, where it was originally developed.
The Mini-Brain platform is a technique that provides the ability to create functional models of the human brain using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). As the iPSCs have been induced to grow into human brain-like cells, which then form the building blocks of these models, research studies employing the platform should be a lot more accurate, reproducible, and faster.
“Acquiring rights to the intellectual property underlying the Mini-Brain technology is a major step forward in our drive to transform neurology drug research,” said Lowry Curley, PhD, Chief Executive Officer of AxoSim. “Mini-Brains are live organoids that mimic multiple brain functions, allowing for a wide variety of applications in neurotoxicity and neurological diseases with the potential to substantially speed-up and increase the effectiveness of new drug R&D. The Mini-Brain technology complements our innovative Nerve-on-a-Chip platform and accelerates our strategy of providing the broadest and most scientifically robust neuroscience models to our growing roster of biopharmaceutical partners.”
Here’s a short video from AxoSim introducing its Mini-Brain platform:
Link: Mini-Brain technology info page…
Via: AxoSim